Abel car polish can
Found this on an exciting discovery, Aaron Eiland's typetoy.com, a huge collection of graphic images. The ribbon writing on this perhaps late 1940s French oil can, is very like Ed Ruscha's gunpowder drawings of the late 1950s.
Last week I was early for a meeting at the Canadian Architectural Archives, located in the UofC library. Time to kill, and a shelf of NC 139 big fat art books right by the door, I went through Margit Rowell's Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha (Steidl, 2008). Pages of plates of drawings of words, so banal they are almost without meaning, or conversely, so banal they are loaded with meaning: Quit, Sin, Pee Pee, and so on. They start with graphite and proceed to gunpowder, then on to chalks and pencil crayons - cheap, easily found drawing materials. It is never about money, art.
At the time that the abstract expressionists were flinging paint all over, Ruscha was doing these painstaking drawings, rubbing powder into paper.
Ed Ruscha. Quit, 1967. gunpowder and coloured pencil on paper. 22.5 x 28.5"