In the early 1960s, Los Angeles–based artist Ed Ruscha started painting single words or phrases on intensely saturated solid backgrounds, creating a body of work referred to as &quot;word pictures.&quot; It was done in an effort to find a new way for paintings to speak. This lined journal, inspired by Ruscha's own notebooks, features <em>NOISE</em>, an early work from the series that seems particularly relevant in today's world of nonstop media noise.