A TRIBUTE TO SIGN PAINTING by Joe Alexander

Around 1995, a great American folk art practiced by generations of artists and craftsmen ever since the birth of the nation and in fact long before, quietly disappeared. This art had provided a livelihood for thousands of excellent artists and craftsmen, it made the commerce of our nation hustle & bustle and it filled the streets and roadways of America with many astonishingly beautiful and creative works of art. Around 1995 it all began to disappear quietly and hardly noticed by anyone, and now ten years later there is virtually nothing left of it. I am referring to the great traditional art of sign painting of course. Of course the streets and roads and shops of America are still full of signs, but there is a subtle difference. The signs you see now are mechanically made dead spiritless
things, the living creative spirit absent from them. That's because they are no longer painted by hand but are made with stick-on vinyl letters from the Signmaker computer machines that have taken over the business since about 1995. Nobody has written any farewell or tribute to the fine old
American art of sign painting, that I am aware of, so I'll take on the job.

I have made my living for most of my adult working life primarily as a sign painter. I got started in 1973. I have always been interested in art and as a teenager discovered that I had a strong love for drawing letters. In '73, I was working as a delivery van driver for a small medical supply company in Toronto. One day as I was driving my van around the city, I was taking special notice of the signs on the other trucks on the road, and the idea suddenly came into my head that I should become a sign painter. It seemed the perfect sort of work for me. I had a strong interest in art but to tell the truth didn't have all that much natural talent, although I worked hard to do good stuff there were many with much more talent than myself and it would be very difficult for me to compete against them in illustration. But I thought I could learn lettering fairly quickly without too much trouble and be quite a good sign painter. I felt sure I could do better than most of the signs I saw on the other trucks on the road. Besides, I liked the idea of getting outside and travelling around town to paint signs on windows and walls and trucks, I'd rather do that than be the sort of sedentary artist who sits in a studio all day.

How do you go about becoming a sign painter? I hadn't a clue. But, having been raised in the new socialist America, in the government schools of the USA and Canada, the first thing I thought of was to go to school for it and get an official credential of some sort proving I was a real sign
painter. So I went down to the George Brown Technical College in Toronto and asked if they had a course in sign painting that I could take. They did! I went to talk to the teacher of the course. He told me sign painting was a very competitive business and you had to be fast and you had to be good and most of the kids who took the sign painting course ended up never actually working in a real sign shop. Just as most of the kids who take fine art at the University never actually sell a painting, I expect. I had been doing Yoga breathing and meditation for about a year and a half before this interview and I was feeling full of energy and ambition as a result, so what he said only made me even more anxious to become a sign painter. Howsoever, there was one little problem and that was the course for that fall had already started a couple of weeks ago and it was too late for me to enroll. Come back next September, Mr. De Jong told me, for now it comes back to me
that that was his name. So I left with plans to return next September.

Meanwhile, I didn't want to waste time. I wanted to learn as much as I could about sign painting before the course started up again. So I got books on lettering with illustrations of the various styles and started drawing them whenever I had some spare time. I got another job at a white-printing
shop. The white-printing operation was in the basement and there was an art supply store above it. So it was real handy for me to go upstairs and get books on lettering and paper and drawing equipment. At lunchtime I'd eat a little bit as fast as I could and then spend the rest of the half-hour
drawing letters. I'd draw letters in my spare time at home also.

My landlord at the time, I was renting an attic room in his house, was a very energetic and ambitious man from India. He was the hardest working man I ever knew, he had his own bookbinding business and driving school plus he worked full time at another bookbinding shop. So he worked 3 full time jobs. He had come to Canada to make money and was doing it! He also did yoga asanas and meditation and I considered him a great yogi and very wise man. He saw me practicing my letters one day and told me I was quite good at it, and further told me that I should print up some flyers advertising myself as a sign painter and put them in the mailboxes of the local shops and I'd get some business. I didn't consider myself a qualified sign painter yet, not having been to school, not having the diploma, and not really knowing the right brushes and paints and equipment to use yet, but since a great yogi was telling me what to do to succeed I figured I better do it! So I did as he said and did in fact get some jobs, and each job I did I did the best I could which was a little better than the shop owner could have done himself, so he was pleased and paid me for it, and each job I did I learned to do a little better the next time, and as I went along I started learning to use proper sign painter's quills instead of cheap hardware store brushes, and 1-Shot paints instead of housepaint, and I saw another sign painter on the street one day using a mahlstick, and saw what a good idea that was, so I made one for myself, and so I was on my way. By the time next fall rolled around and the course was going to start at the George Brown College
again, I was already supporting myself full time by my own sign painting business. I thought it was interesting that this man from India had so much more of the spirit of free enterprise than myself who had been born and raised in the USA supposedly the greatest entrepreneurial country in the world. I was born in Chicago and lived in the USA until 1967 when my father got work in Canada and moved the family up there. In '79 I decided I wanted to move back to the US & did so and that is how I ended up here in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

I still wanted to take the course at George Brown because I was at that point completely self-taught and figured I'd have a lot to learn from somebody that really knew the business. But then just before the course was to start, I saw an ad in the want ads of the paper, a sign shop wanted help. I went and applied for the job and they hired me. They didn't consider I was really a professional sign painter but they saw that I was serious about learning the work, had already made a good start, and they were willing to take me on and train me. This shop did mostly paper banners, at that time
there were many clothing and discount and other sorts of shops in Toronto that regularly ran sales of one sort or another and they'd put a new set of paper banners in the windows to advertise each new sale. And so that was what we mostly did at this shop, Dynamic Signs, it was called. It was
the best possible training for a beginning sign painter, I think. Every day, for 8 hours a day, I'd have to knock out one paper banner after another as fast as possible. I had to learn to make a good layout fast and I'd have to learn to look mostly at the overall pattern of the letters and be more
concerned with a good pattern than individual perfection of each letter. After work and on weekends I'd continue doing my own business.

Sign painting also forced me into a complete artistic re-education. I had grown up as a typical left-wing modernistic art student, and therefore knew almost nothing real about art but was convinced I was ever so much smarter than the people with common sense who could see what looked good and what didn't. Well, that wouldn't fly in the sign business. I had to do stuff that the crass commercial businessman who didn't know a damned thing about art but knew what looked right and what didn't, could see looked right. I couldn't tell him that I was a hot-shot modernistic art student and I knew better than he did what was good art and so he should take a funny-looking
sign on my say-so because I was the Art Expert and he was just a rotten crass commercial capitalist businessman. He wouldn't pay for a job like that. If I was going to make any money and hold on to my job and keep my business going I had to do stuff that your crass commercial businessman could see looked right. And it wasn't easy to do such stuff! Even though I was already pretty good at drawing figures from life and portraits from life and doing weird surrealistic paintings, lettering was something else again and I really had to start from scratch to learn it. I remember pouring all my concentration, sweating bullets as they say, trying to control the brush to paint a good smooth graceful letter O or letter S. Eventually it started to flow, I'd say my letters really started to look professional two years after I started. And I started to have a lot more respect for the
artistic taste of the average businessman. It wasn't easy to learn to paint a sign that he'd see was good, and when I finally became able to really do it I felt I had achieved something pretty worthwhile. It started to dawn on me that common sense was a better guide to what was good art than a modernistic education. If it obviously looked good, it was! If it looked like a sloppy slipshod unskilled chaotic mess, then by golly that's what it was! Even if some New York art expert told you it was great fine art. You don't have to believe them even though the slick magazines tell you they're the Experts.

I worked at Dynamic Signs about 7 months, then got a job at another shop called Banner Signs. There I was fortunate enough to work with and learn from 2 excellent sign painters, of totally opposite temperament. One was a fellow named Ross Bennington and he did the most beautiful casual-style letters I had ever seen. I had seen his signs all over town and greatly admired them. He was a superb showcard writer. He had got his start at Honest Ed's, a big department discount store in Toronto. They used lots of showcards around the store, with prices and item descriptions, and hired their own in-house showcard writer. The showcard writer had to knock out lots of these things every day, and do it fast and make them look good, and so I think that was where Ross had learned to write such beautiful casual letters. There are, or were, 2 general classes of letter stlyes used by sign painters, formal and casual. You could knock out the casual styles faster so that was what Ross had become extremely good at, though he did fine Helveticas and other formal letter styles on the occasions that he'd letter a truck or a board. So I practiced and practiced and tried to become able to do slash and script as beautifully as Ross. I think I got pretty close but he was always a little ahead of me. The other sign painter at Banner was an Italian fellow named Aldo. He was also a Jehovah's Witness minister. He worked in a suit and tie and was the neatest sign painter I ever saw. He never spilled paint, never got a spot on his suit. He was the best I ever saw at the formal letter styles, he would paint them absolutely perfectly, his Os were always perfectly smooth and symmetrical, likewise his Ss and other letters. If you want to see how good a sign painter is, look at his Ss. If they're smooth and graceful and well-balanced, you've got a pro.

I worked at Banner for about a year and then went to another shop, Metro Signs. This place was run by a Hungarian named Tony Chonka. He was a hard driver and excellent artist. I learned to do things from him that few other sign painters knew. He did the highest quality sign work in town, he
had customers with fleets of trucks coming to him to have their logos done on the truck in gold leaf, he was the only one they'd trust to do a good job of it. He made me learn to hold my paint cup and mahl stick both in my left hand and palette the brush on the side of the cup. It makes you faster,
more flexible, and wastes less paint. Most sign painters would hold the mahl stick in their left hand, the brush in their right, and set the paint cup down on a table next to them, and palette the brush on a scrap of cardboard next to the paint cup. Very clumsy, slow and wasteful compared to what
Tony taught me. It was a bit tough to get the hang of it at first but when I did I was really glad he had forced me to learn to do it if I wanted to work at his shop! He also taught me to paint very thin letters with the tip of the brush. Very few sign painters could do this, most knew only how to use
the flat of the brush. But learning to letter with the tip made you able to do some truly beautiful work not possible otherwise. It would look really sharp to contrast a line of bold letters done with the flat of the brush with a line of thin letters done with the tip. I took some trips to Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Tucson, Miami & Orlando in the late '70s during my years as a Toronto sign painter, and though I saw some fine work in all those places, I'd say that Toronto had the highest average standard of sign painting of any city in North America during the '70s and '80s. And some of the sign painters I worked with were some of the main reasons why.

While I was working at these other shops I was always doing my own business part time after work and on weekends, I just couldn't get enough of sign painting back then, I wanted to be the best. After about 2 years at Metro I quit to go out on my own full time. I was a real professional sign
painter by then. I briefly worked for another man, who treated me well and paid cash under the table which was terrific. But he wanted me to speed up and cut quality too much so I quit working for him. I wanted to be fast, and from watching Ross Bennington especially I knew you could do extremely good work quite fast. But there was a point that you'd lose quality if you tried to go too fast, this man wanted me to do that & I wasn't willing to. After that I did my own business totally until I left Toronto in '79. At first I was afraid I wouldn't get enough work to do my own business full time but I always had more than I could handle.

When I left off, as I recall, I was leaving Toronto to go to Nevada City in northern California. When I got there I met a sign painter named Darshan who had a shop called Signs by Darshan and got work with him. That was a real good job. He thought I was a very good sign painter and valued my work highly. He paid me by the job rather than by the hour and that's really the right way to go. After all, a boss values your production, not your time. Darshan would give me a percentage of the price he was getting for a sign. And then I could take as much or as little time as I found necessary to do a good job of it. When you work by the hour the boss is always breathing down your neck trying to make you speed up, and you sometimes feel too rushed to do what you know is really a proper job of it. But when you're paid piecework, so much for each unit of production, you can much better work at your own speed, slow & careful if your main concern is to do it right & don't care if you are making the absolute max possible money, or if you want to put some elbow into it & get the job done faster you can make more money. Either way you can better work at your own speed & not be pushed by the boss so much. It was interesting the difference between my work and Darshan's. He was a good sign painter, he knew all the tricks and letter styles, but everything he did looked a little clumsy & sloppy to me, the proportions of the letters always seemed just a little bit wrong, lines a little too curved when they ought to be straighter, letters maybe leaning a little to one side or the other when they ought to be straight up & down plumb. That's the human touch of the individual that was always there in hand-painted signs. Two sign painters might work from the same pattern to do the same sign with the same layout & letters, but you could instantly tell which one did which. Somehow the personality of the individual always came through and every good sign painter had a style which was instantly recognizable. It's not like that with the stick-on vinyl letters. Everybody has the same computer program I guess and you can't tell who did what, it all looks the same, all over the country. They say diversity is our strength & if that's true then the computers have got the country on its sickbed where signs are concerned.

I spent about a year in California, then came here to Fayetteville in Arkansas. That was in early 1980. I decided to stay in Fayetteville because, while driving around the Ozarks trying to figure out where I wanted to settle, I stopped at a laundromat on the south side of Fayetteville to go in & wash up a bit- the owner looked at the sign on my pickup that said I painted signs and he hired me on the spot to letter his truck. So Ithought Fayetteville would be a good place to set up shop.

Fayetteville was a much smaller town then with very few sign shops & the computers weren't even dreamed of back in 1980. I quickly became the best shop in town, my training in Toronto put me considerably above anyone in small town Arkansas in sign painting ability. There was a fellow living in Fayetteville then named Archie Pilgrim. Archie was a tall young black fellow from Greenbrier, Arkansas, and he was a genius level artist. He was like Leonardo da Vinci, he seemed to have every talent a person could have in abundance. Archie could draw and paint wonderful realistic pictures, and he could do them from memory and imagination & you'd almost swear they were a photograph of a real scene. Archie was a fabulous cartoonist, which I've never been much good at. When I came to Fayetteville, Archie was starting to do some sign painting at another shop where the work they did wasn't all that hot. I showed Archie all the tricks I had learned in Toronto & in six months he was much better than I was. I improved quite a bit in the early '80s from working hard trying to do something as good as Archie could. Unfortunately, sometime around '87, Archie made a very stupid remark to the local Prosecuting Attorney & was held at the state mental hospital in Little Rock for a year all doped up on thorazine. I saw him once again in Texas in '89 after he was released & he seemed the same old Archie, none the worse for the horrendous abuse in the hospital, so I hope he's OK now, I've lost touch with him and don't know where he is or what he's doing. He's definitely one of the greatest sign painters, greatest artists & remarkable individuals I've ever known.

Another outstanding sign painter of the Ozarks that I never met personally but saw his work all over Eureka Springs in the "80s, was a fellow named Auxier. That was how he signed his work, Auxier. He was obviously a genius level artist, all the letters he painted were similar to various standard typestyles but he always had a way of giving them a creative twist, just a little bit different from the standard letter style, that was absolutely wonderful. And his signs were always colorful & creatively designed. Someone told me that Auxier never practiced, that when he had decided to become a sign painter, he said he wasn't going to do any work without getting paid for it, and apparently he was able to do all this fabulous stuff right from the start without any long training or practicing. Last I heard of Auxier he had moved to Durango, Colorado, I believe it was in the early '90s. But this example makes a point about the art of sign painting, and that is, that back in the days of the hand painted sign, almost every town had a very talented artist or two at least who went into sign painting. And so the streets of American towns, even a lot of the smaller towns, were like wonderful outdoor art galleries where you could see the work of some extremely good talented and creative artists, and every one of them different in some interesting way that you wouldn't have imagined until you saw it. Of course a lot of the people who went into sign painting weren't very good at all and so you saw plenty of junk too. So what the computers have done, is give all the signs a uniform mediocrity. Since the computer spits out perfect typestyles, you don't see the lettering atrocities that used to frequently be committed by bad sign painters. But since the touch of the great human artist is also gone, you also don't see the outstandingly creative & beautiful work that you used to. All the signs are now done to a uniform standard of mediocrity, & you no longer see the very bad nor the outstandingly good.

And that's a problem for me because now I can't get inspiration and ideas from other sign painters. I'd used to look at the signs done by others and get all sorts of creative layout and lettering ideas and when I'd see something particularly good it would push me to try harder to do real good stuff myself. So I'm afraid that I'm getting stale and repetitious because of no fresh input to my brain from other good sign painters. I'm finding you can't really keep an art alive all by yourself, for any art to survive & develop it needs at least a few dozen practitioners feeding each other with the examples of their work. And probably the materials for sign painting will no longer be available pretty soon. So far I've been able to continue to get the quill lettering brushes and 1-Shot sign painting enamels, but as the number of sign painters in the country dwindles I expect these items
will soon no longer be available. And of course there are no longer any young folks learning sign painting. Any young person going into the sign business will learn to use the computer and that's it. I've had a few young artistically inclined ladies and gentlemen ask me questions about learning
sign painting, & I'm glad to tell them whatever I know that would help them learn, but I also always warn them that there's no commercial market for hand-painted signs any more so don't bother to learn hand lettering unless they just want to pursue it as a hobby for some strange reason. When I
went into sign painting in the '70s I thought how wonderful it was that here was an occupation that an artist could go into for which there was a strong demand in the everyday world of business and commerce, an occupation that an artist could do that was part of everyday mainstream life and not just some little boutiquey business or something that only a few academics or hobbyists or some other little isolated clique of people cared about. I thought all the time that it was too good to last, that surely some stinking technocratic bastard would invent a machine to do make signs and
deprive artists of yet another avenue of making a living as part of the normal mainstream commercial world, and sure enough, around 1995 they did. So I enjoyed about 20 glorious years in the heyday of the hand painted sign era before it all went bust. And I'd say the '70s, '80s, and early '90s really were the heyday, the glory days, the golden age, of hand painted signs. I've looked at old "Signs of the Times" magazines from the '40s and '50s and '60s, they had them at one of the shops I worked at, and it looks like it was all pretty plain back then. But then, it seems, in the '70s there started an explosion of creativity in the sign business, with good sign painters all over working overtime to outdo themselves and each other in developing all sorts of interesting, creative and beautiful new letter variations, color schemes and layouts. And then suddenly in '95 it all came
to an end, and like I said, now all the signs have a standard uniform dead mediocrity. There may have also been a lot of very creative work in the 1920s, judging from an old book from that era that I have, H.C. Martin's 1000 SHOWCARD LAYOUTS. That fellow was really outstandingly creative &
if he was typical of the times then that must have also been a heyday for good sign painting.
From my observations, the art of sign painting became most highly developed in America, which includes the U.S.A. and Canada. Of course there was sign painting in every country, but I think American sign painters were the best. I visited India in 1983 and saw what they did there. Their
sign painters did some colorful stuff with a lot of creative vitality to it, but all at an amateurish level compared to America. The Indian sign painters didn't come near to matching the professionalism of good American sign painters, from what I saw. The same goes for what I've seen coming out of
Mexico and Latin America. I've seen some photos of Australian sign painting, and while it was reasonably professional, it looked old-fashioned compared to American work; it looks to me like the Australians did in the '80s, the sort of thing that Americans did in the '30s. Now I've seen photos of
English and European sign painting that show it to be very good, very professional, but all quite formal compared to American work. Americans developed the art of showcard writing, and painting signs with flair and dynamism and snap to a higher degree than anyone else. Nobody knows how
to advertise like Americans and the American sign painters developed a style to do it like nobody else in the world. I think that good American sign painters were among the finest lettering artists the world has ever known, being able to render a variety of styles neatly with excellent rhythm and
snap in a way that is seen otherwise only in the finest calligraphy. Many American sign painters were also good at pin striping on cars and trucks, and could do amazing intricate symmetrical designs comparable to the finest calligraphic flourishes. The high-class fine art world has never paid
any attention to sign painting, considering it to be merely a low-class commercial craft of no importance, but I think many good sign painters have been among the finest artists in the world. Another thing about sign painting was the way it facilitated such a broad-based participation in the
development of lettering. Every small town sign painter had a chance to develop new letter styles or fine-tune existing styles in his or her own unique creative way, and many were as good or better than the best typestyle designers. And every time the letters were painted by hand, they were a
fresh living creation full of the fresh living creative spirit, even if just a rendering of an old tried and true style, still the fact of being freshly created to the best of the sign painter's ability at the moment made them a living creation on the cutting edge of evolution. Every small town sign painter had a chance to be at the cutting edge of the evolution of the art form. Not any more; with the vinyl letters now all the letters on every sign are merely a dead mechanical reproduction of a form that was frozen in its development years ago. Only the top letter designers who can sell to the typestyle propagation companies can participate in the evolution and development of the letters. I think the net result has to be far less creativity. So, I believe that when I left off I had just finished talking about how sign painting was such an egalitarian sort of art, it allowed people all over the country in every hamlet, village, town and city to participate in the ancient and hallowed art of lettering design, to learn the basics of the different styles and then let their imagination go free and see what they
could do, see what interesting variations & creative alterations on the tried-&-true letter designs they could come up with, see if they had what it takes to come up with something really fine! A sign painter had a whole working day every day to exercise his or her creativity on the letters and
so over the years a lot of them came up with some truly fine new & unique letter styles. And of course all that came to a screeching halt when the Sign maker computers came on the scene and all of a sudden there was no more room for individual creativity when it came to the letters- you did
what you had on your computer program and that was it! So I think this has taken the people in the sign business down a notch or two- instead of being creative artists in their own right now they are merely monkeys punching out the designs of others. In California some years ago I met an artist named Lorenzo Strauss- he was one of those rare artists who really thought intelligently about the subject & was good to talk to about art. He put me on to a number of good books on art that I hadn't known about before and one of them was by an author named Coomaraswamy. Coomaraswamy said something in one of his books that has stuck in my mind- and that was, that if the labor unions had any sense they wouldn't fight so much for higher wages or more bennies or longer vacations or shorter hours, but for the right to be artists at their work. Because that's what gives dignity to your job & makes you grow as a person from doing it- if you are an artist at it,
exercising creative thought of your own as you do it, as opposed to just following a routine that somebody else has set for you to do. Of course originally all work offered an opportunity for creative artistry as each job was done one at a time with simple sorts of tools and you had to think about every move you made and as you did your work you would evolve a great deal of creative ability as you figured out the best ways to do each job! Of course the problem here was that working in this manner takes a lot of time, it takes a long time to make a pair of shoes with hand tools or a chair or a jacket or whatsoever the item is. So the technocrats invented the system of mass production where more and more standard items are turned out by machines with less and less intelligent thought and creative input required of the workers running the machines. And people love it because it turns out more stuff faster which can be sold cheaper & instead of individual artisans
running their own shops, one factory owner can hire a thousand folks & by reducing their wages to the minimum & selling the stuff for all the traffic will bear, the factory owner can pocket a lot more profit for himself. And the bankers love it because the machinery of production is very expensive
compared to the cost of the artisan's hand tools, and so the banker gets to loan a lot of money for the capitalization of a factory and make tons of profit on the loan. But the people working in this system of production don't get the dignity and learning experience and spiritual growth of being
creative artisans. But that can't be measured in the bottom line so we won't worry about that, will we? But I think it eventually shows up in a decaying society as people just don't become as fully mature and intelligent and creative as they might otherwise have been. Well the pop-up windows are telling me the library is about to close so I'll have to finish writing this little essay later. So, as I recall I left off writing about how the computer-generated vinyl lettering systems that now totally dominate the sign business have deprived thousands of formerly creative artisans in towns and cities all over America of the opportunity to participate in the art of letter design. Of course the
rationale is that vinyl is faster and cheaper than hand-painting and that's why it must be done! This is the rationale for why pretty much everything in business and economics must be done in a particular way- it is faster and cheaper! I think we all ought to question why fast and cheap should be the highest value in life. Carried to its logical conclusion, the best thing you could do would be to shoot yourself in the head with a .22 pistol. It would be a lot cheaper to spend a nickel for a .22 cartridge than $5 for your next meal, and it would be a lot faster than letting your life drag on and
on to its natural conclusion. Since you're going to die anyway, why not get it over with, fast and cheap? I think we all know that the best things in life, the things that really make life worthwhile, do not come fast and cheap. For example, I have found that doing yoga exercises every morning give me a most wonderfully higher quality of life. But it certainly isn't fast cheap and easy to do them. It takes some time, it is difficult, it is arduous, it is painful, it costs a great deal in terms of the effort to do them, though admittedly it doesn't cost any money. But, doing it gives a quality of life beyond compare. It's worth it. Similarly, becoming a skillful realist artist is certainly not fast easy convenient & cheap. It takes hours of work every day for years. But it gives you the ability to create things that are considered among the greatest treasures of human accomplishment. I think it's worth it. So I urge people to question this philosophy that dominates business and economics- that fast easy convenient and cheap is the ultimate good and only legitimate justification for doing anything. Of course a person can assert that the computers have opened up a whole new realm of creative opportunities- a person can now be a website designer & a program creator, can be an independent investigative journalist who can post very significant writings on the net for all the world to read as people like Jon Rappaport & Alex Jones and a whole bunch of others have done, to help people get the truth that the Big Media work relentlessly to obfuscate! The computers have opened up a whole boatload of new creative professions that did not exist before! And I have to admit, you've got a point if you say that! Well, I think the point I'd like to make is this: there is always a need for both sides of the coin. I once got a letter from a Mohawk Indian fellow who wrote "Walk in Balance" just before he signed his name. And since then I've reflected often on how true that is. Whatever there is a need for, there is equally a need for the opposite. Plants need the sun to grow, they also need the rain. You need to work and be active, you also need to sleep. A good picture needs highlights, it also needs some spots of darkness and shadow. Now we are constantly told about man's need for Progress and Technology! Science must advance, progress must go on,
technology must be developed further and further! Well, I think that means there is equally a need for the primitive in life. We need raw organic food, we need to get outside in the sun and breathe fresh air and walk and run and do some hard manual labor, we need to do some things by primitive
artisanal methods as well as high-tech means and methods! I think many many people have found there is no satisfaction in life if they try to go all to the side of progress and high-tech & have none of the natural & primitive in their life. So that's why I still have so much love for an old-timey art like sign painting. Well, I guess sign painting is gone for good now. There have been some revivals of certain forms of artisanship, for instance pottery making has become quite popular since the '70s, after factory production methods all but destroyed it. I think the hand-making of knives has seen a certain revival in the number of practitioners in recent years. I don't think this will happen with sign painting though. Everybody is potentially a customer for a hand made pot or knife, but it's only
businesses that are customers for signs and more and more business is corporate & will look for the most efficiently produced sign rather than a sign with any artistic quality. And as the older sign painters like myself gradually disappear there will be no one to teach it even if a young person
wants to learn, and the tools and materials for making hand painted signs like the quill brushes and good lettering paints will disappear from the market. So I think sign painting is gone for good! But- since it was a beautiful art that I have devoted many years of my life to, and one which provided so many thousands of artistic people the opportunity to make a decent living at for so many decades in every town and city all across America, and since it put so many works of excellent beautiful &
creative art out on the streets for millions to see for so many decades, I don't feel it's right for it to disappear and die completely unsung unhonored and unnoticed. So that is why I have written this Tribute to Sign Painting. There are people who were better sign painters than me and smarter than
me and better writers than me who I'm sure could have done a better job of it than me, but as far as I know, nobody else has done it. So since I think somebody ought to, I have. The end!