Artist Curated: Ten Artworks in Ten Minutes : Miles Aldridge

'Ed Ruscha is an artist who has many different aspects to his work. There’s the photography, the cataloguing of Sunset Boulevard, all the swimming pools, parking lots; a brilliant, postmodern idea and an incredible use of the camera in a kind of cold, dispassionate way without any kind of emotion - I like that coldness. This piece a screenprint from 1971 called Raw is one of many of Ruscha’s word prints, where word and image come together to create something fresh and new. I love the palette. It's really sort of strange and disturbing, like something from a David Lynch film, and the strange quality of the word reclining, feels like it might be something from a title sequence of a 1930s film' - Aldridge

'I love Gary's work. It's endlessly inventive in its use of printmaking. I spent hours just studying his prints and how he builds up layers of ink, the surface of the paper is played with lacquer and varnish. And this print has all of those elements, which I find so sort of beguiling in his work. I also love how this flower is drawn, almost with a Tipp-Ex by a secretary during her lunch break, taking a break from correcting the typing.' - Aldridge

'I chose this little drawing by Michael Canning in graphite of a little bird because it reminds me of a few things that I really love. It reminds me of going to the Natural History Museum as an art student and drawing the stuffed birds there myself. But, it's like a line from a Ted Hughes poem, Thrushes, in which Ted Hughes talks about how the thrushes have this incredible sort of mechanical action with their sort of pecking and pecking and pecking of the worms in the ground.' - Aldridge 

'Harland Miller's In Shadows I Boogie is an extraordinary piece of printmaking. The print itself has its own kind of palette separate from the painting, equally as beautiful, but in a way richer. I actually did my own project based on Harland’s painting In Shadows I Boogie where I included a miniature version of his painting as a book cover in the hand of one of my actresses.' - Aldridge

'I love this portrait of Jean Harlow. It's so sort of painterly and sumptuous with its choice of colours. And inspiring to me and my own work is this very brutal halftone dot that he's used in black and white to contrast against the areas of flat pink and tangerine and emerald green.' - Aldridge