“[I am] a victim of the horizontal line, and the landscape, which is almost one and the same to me.”
—Ed Ruscha
In Pico and Sepulveda, Ed Ruscha invents his own stylized landscape conventions. Mapping is a practical and ordinary way of stylizing a landscape, but with the screenprinted map Pico and Sepulveda, Ruscha has taken additional liberties with mapmaking conventions, using fine speckles to create a hypnotic, landscape that recall the texture of asphalt streets, an element deemed erroneous in typical roadmaps. While many of Ruscha’s landscapes are defined by distinctive and often extreme horizontality, Ruscha pushes the genre’s definition and his own stylistic hallmarks with Pico and Sepulveda: two simple lines intersect to represent Ruscha’s city of Los Angeles.
The intersection of West Pico Boulevard and South Sepulveda Boulevard – the longest street in L.A. –is located in the Westside suburban neighborhood of Rancho Park. Before Ruscha’s screenprint, the cross streets served as the title to the 1947 song Pico and Sepulveda by Freddie Martin, preformed under the alias of Felix Figueroa – a stage name also derivative from a major north-south Los Angeles street with a checkered past. As the Latin-inspired beat plays, the backing band namedrops various L.A. avenues, many of which are mispronounced by newcomers to the city, while Martin croons about his desire to "feel alive and settle down in my La Brea Tar Pits, where nobody's dreams come true."
