Here’s a segment about New Bohemia Signs, filmed in July, for NHK’s El Mundo show, aired the first Tuesday in August.  Candice Obayashi translated into English for me, with some help from her mother.

There are a few minor inaccuracies in the report.  I don’t know where they got the idea that I only started hiring people two years ago.  The newest people at NBS have been there for about two years now.  I’ve only been painting signs since ’99, myself–not quite the 15 years claimed herein (but close).  The line mentioning “an exhibit of work that has been made in Damon’s shop” is delivered over a shot of a sign painted by Josh Luke, at his own shop, Best Dressed Signs, in Boston (granted, after half a decade of working at NBS, and having been invited to take part in a “New Bohemia Signs art show”).  Actually, as a matter of fact, I don’t recall them ever even mentioning “New Bohemia Signs” in here…  It’s all “Damon Styer-san” this, and “Damon-san” that, which is kinda… ridiculous….  We put the producers in touch with one of our gold suppliers, Ron, at Letterhead Sign Supply, and I gather his reply to a question about how many gilders he sells to–lots!–didn’t quite jibe with the story arc being plotted, wherein Damon-san is nearly single-handedly keeping a dying craft alive.  My apologies to all the long-suffering sign gilders out there, for having nabbed some of your glory!

What else…?  Oh, it’s pretty rare that anyone just practices for two hours a day.  Some might, on occasion.  I ask them all to put in a half hour, but even that goes out the door, when it gets busy (which is, itself, practice, anyway).

Special thanks to Derek Fagerstrom, at The Curiosity Shoppe, for letting us pull him outside and make him talk; to Andres Guerrero, of Guerrero Gallery, for letting the film crew hassle patrons; to Mark Norrell, of West Portal Optical, for tolerating our sodden trudging through his new shop space; to Candice and to Ken Davis, for shouldering some of the bull spewing duties; and to Hideharu Watanabe, who produced the segment and handled all the on location shooting logistics.

Since those couple of days of shooting have ended, I’ve felt lonely showing up anywhere without my film crew…

Anyway, I hope the bigwigs at the NHK network allow this to stay up.  I’m not sure what their policy is about online video, since they don’t appear to be hosting much, themselves.

Furthermore, I hope this leads to work in Japan!  Or, better yet, vacation in Japan!

Although, Damon and I could only stop in for a tiny bit, I was perfectly in love with what Larry has created out of a bland industrial space in Hayward. Amazing work! Thank you Larry for all of your enthusiasm.

If you want to see the rest of the set, click here.
Check out more of Larry White’s work at walljewelry.com.

I happened to see a brief story in the Chronicle this morning, about an old sign that was recently uncovered when the Bayview branch of the public library was demolished for rebuilding. The previous structure had been there since 1921, so it’s at least that old. I sent Scott out to snap a picture, before the new branch library goes up, and covers the sign for another century. The Chronicle had an interesting conversation with the SF Planning Department’s Dan Sider:

“I don’t know how we would classify that sign under the Planning Code,” he said with a laugh. “It isn’t really advertising. Maybe I would call it art?”

The city recently decided they wanted to protect vintage signs after an uproar over an old Coca-Cola sign in Bernal Heights. Planners found that sign to be illegal and ordered it painted over, until the Board of Supervisors created a new process to protect vintage signs.

The Vintage Workwear blog notes that the “N.B. Products” banner, in the corner, refers to Neustadter Brothers, a workwear manufacturer that eventually came under the ownership of Lee Jeans. They also link to a photo of the area, from 1928, wherein this sign is obscured by the adjacent storefront, below another sign for Ed’s Shop. Elsewhere on the web, I can find pictures of Neustadter Brothers’ office buildings on the 100 block of Sansome, and at 1st and Mission, in San Francisco; and a picture of one of their Boss of the Road ads, from a 1905 Portland Fire Dep’t Yearbook.

According to the archives of the USGenWeb project, “Neustadter Brothers first began business in San Francisco in 1852, the original partners being Louis and Henry Neustadter. They prospered from the beginning, the business growing in volume and importance, and in 1900 the company was incorporated in California and Oregon, with a capital stock of one million dollars.”

I’m indulging my compulsion to write thoughts about what I painted for the Guerrero Gallery art show.  I can’t find a way to work much of this into whatever few conversations have arisen around it, and I don’t seem otherwise willing to bring it up, myself.  In the end,  this is just something I like to create for my own fun, from time to time, written blather about whatever is passing through my mind.  Signs, on the other hand, are far more often something I help create for others.  If “art” is what it’s called when I paint signs for myself, then I count myself among the artists who draw some pleasure from trying to explain it. blah, blah, BLAH! Seriously, I can’t even read this. I need an editor and/or someone to tell me when a blog post is a bad idea.

I was, in the run up to the show at Guerrero (but really, for that matter, always) thinking about copping other people’s designs, or styles, or letters, to solve the problem of coming up with something called art, because that, to me, is frequently (always?) key in the solution to coming up with something called signs.  I’m intrigued by the opportunity to explore, artistically, what copying means, at least inasmuch as it relates to how I approach sign making.

It’s a function of my profession that I feel a little like my imagination is frequently hijacked by an external need to come up with signs. Is copying just a habit, something I “fall back” on?  Is copying indicative of whatever resistance I have, to expending imagination on signs?  I may nag myself with those questions, but I prefer to think copying is one of the best ways of communicating what I think looks good, and also, that it’s the way the world works.  At any rate, here’s a chance to try to more directly address some ideas about copying, within the mode of sign painting.

I could quickly come up with a list of people, or of resources, whose recognizable style (as I recognize it, anyway) I’d like to try to draw from: Jeff Canham, Ken Davis, Indian truck lettering, Der Praktische Schildermaler…  In the end, I piled up plenty of work for myself, too much to get done in timely fashion.  As it turns out, I’ll have to bite Ken’s style on another occasion.

I thought, if I were planning to ape other people in the show, it’d be rude to leave Steve Powers out, though I don’t know him that well.  He’s a fountain of ideas, intimidatingly so.  My impression is that, despite an occasional flipped bird or clever insult, his art spews positivity.  His projects are so often seeking or extolling love, or trumpeting the strength of community.  When they’re unhappy, they’re empathic.  Sure, not always, but again: it’s an impression.  Meanwhile, whenever I’m pondering painting a sign as art, my first half-dozen ideas are assorted puns and wisecracks, in subtle shades of snark.  I felt like, to properly copy Steve Powers, I needed to write something warm, I needed to access whatever sentiments in myself would be suitable for billboards commissioned by the City of Brotherly Love.

It was long about this time, with assorted ideas about all this bobbing around my head, but nothing compelling enough for me to strike, that Up in the Air reached the top of our Netflix queue.  I really enjoyed this song:

…and that just seemed to clear out a lot of hesitation, to set things in motion, tie things together.  That’d be my message to myself, and my message about what I advocate.  I didn’t need to come up with which words might work best with which style: I could state plainly that I’m helping myself to whatever I like, however I can, and think you should, too.  In so doing, I’m earning some breadth of experience, triggering some new synapses, and thereby, helping myself in other ways, as well.

So, that struck me as a positive enough sentiment for a Steve Powers piece, and I got started with that one.

I decided pretty quickly to play with mixing and matching a variety of colors, in the fashion of his Everything is Shit Except You Love print.  I tried a few grid layouts, but I felt like I wanted a little more motion in it.  I like his lighthouse piece, and it didn’t take me long to figure how I could work in some trapezoidal shapes, and canted lettering.  I found a photo of a woman shouting into a megaphone, and traced a pattern for the shape of her face on vellum with a Sharpie.

I talked with a few people about whether or not to clean up the edges of the megaphones, where paint had crept under the mask, when I rolled them out.  I decided that was an artifact of the process that didn’t detract from the piece, and if anything, referenced quickly executed street art.

Figuring out exactly how to tackle Jeff Canham proved a little more taxing for me, than anticipated.  He’s got a favorite (albeit ever evolving) limited palate; he’s got a few favorite fonts; a recognizable library of motifs, backgrounds and type treatments; and a habit of hanging his art in attractive mosaic clusters.  I’m familiar enough with what he does, and with much of how he does it, that it would be relatively easy for me to write some words, Canham style, in Canham colors.  Of course, I’d prob’ly fail to capture quite the same elegance he conveys, practiced as he is, so I shied away from hanging something next to his own art, in this show, that might invite so direct a comparison of things like quality of brush stroke and metric proportions.  How might I, instead, refer to some of the elements I like best in his art, without just, um… copying?  I guess the bolder choice would have been just to straight up copy…  Bah!  Well, I’m happy with where I went with it.

It’s been raining pretty late into spring/summer, here in SF, so the umbrellas have been around a lot.  I can’t remember when I finally saw one as a stretched canvas.  Its association with both water and sun seemed like very Canhamesque themes.  I like how it refers to textile design, in which Jeff’s been getting lots of work lately–he’s even designed an umbrella!  I decided I wanted to mix colors to suggest overlaid transparent inks, as they show up in some of his screenprints, like this one:

Hey, there’s an umbrella, there, too!

The real chore proved to be laying out twelve letters across eight sections of umbrella, in a circle no less.  I sketched out lot of variations, and took frequent breaks to work on other art.  I guess I could have ignored the numbers…  But, anyway, eventually, I clued into the common denominator (four), and came up with the bipartite solution: rainy on one side, sunny on the other.  And things felt like they were coming together.

I commissioned Deb to sew me triangular flag for the umbrella’s mast/peak/antenna/tip/whatever that part is called.

While I was busy being stumped by the umbrella, I got busier, helping myself to some of my favorite plates from Der Praktische Schildermaler.

I was glad to find a place for me to do some surface gilding.  I really enjoyed improvising the textured background with a sponge.  There were all sorts of spatial arrangement questions that flipping through the plates in that collection presented unique answers for.

Also, I finally got started on a long-held desire to paint myself a rug:

The design for the rug came from a Taschen collection, A Visual History of Typefaces & Graphic Styles, 1628-1900, specifically from an example drawn from a French colonial type specimen catalogue.  There was very little lettering on the original plate, which made it an odd inclusion for a type specimen catalogue.  What writing was there, looked, to me, like Devanagari, so I’m guessing the designs in that section of the book were from whichever parts of French India didn’t write and speak Tamil.  There wasn’t much information about it in the book.  Just lots of pretty pictures.  And a passkey to an online trove of “over 1000 high-resolution scans of type specimens downloadable for unrestricted use”.  Score!  I used the hi-res scan to draw outlines around a quarter of the rug pattern, then just flipped the pattern around whichever part of the rug I needed to work on.  I spent a few hours a day painting it, over the course of a week.

I call it “Help Yourself (to 19th c. French Colonial “Specimens Typographies”, much as they helped themselves to their colonies)”.  It’s not an especially profound meditation on the morality of colonialism. “Here’s a pretty thing I shall help myself to”, is a sentiment that has provoked a lot of distress all over the world, throughout history, and I don’t think I’m hereby offering blanket tacit approval.  I’m curious how, after all, someone came to be in a position to tell me this image is available for “unrestricted use”.  Of all the work I did for this show, this is the one most directly drawn from its source material, not least on account of its unrestrictedness.

I don’t know how long it takes to weave a rug.  I also don’t suspect rug weavers get paid an hourly rate anywhere akin to what I charge.  I don’t know quite how far to take any analogies between rug weavers and sign painters.  Since I’m showing signs in a gallery, as art, I s’pose I’m still working out whatever ways that which we do treads the line between “art” and “craft”.

I see something of a visual metaphor in the piece.  I’m not sure quite how well it translates, but since I can’t not see it now, you get the chance to try and unsee it, too: the “help yourself” looks out on the sea through a porthole in a vessel something like images of Jules Verne’s Nautilus; but around the porthole is a carved stone window screen, through which we see a sea of blood.  Is that too overwrought?

As I finished the rug, I started another project which would rest on the shoulders of Indian craftspeople, based on pictures I took, of decorated “timber lorries” (logging trucks), at a depot, in Alleppey, in the South Indian state of Kerala, when my wife and I were there during our honeymoon.  There are lots of really excellent resources online, for examples of South Asian sign painting, and especially the lettering on the outlandishly decorated trucks of India and Pakistan.  I really like this font, developed by Anton Hart, and inspired by these trucks, but I can’t find where to download it from:

Ultimately, I decided just to work from the examples I’d taken pictures of, myself, because they were so exciting to see, in real life, when I was there.

These were, by far, the most fun thing to paint, of everything I worked on for this show.  I sketched a layout in my notepad, and drew the letters directly on the boards, without a pattern.  I bore in mind, all the while, that, ornate as they look, they had to be done very quickly, and relatively casually, because these trucks need to get out on the road, and the driver can’t afford to pay all that much.  So, all the floral work, and the multicolored fills in the letters, was improvised according to rules made up, on the fly, based on the photos I took of signs like these, in Alleppey.  I made a point of, wherever possible, using colors I’d already mixed for other signs in the show, if not straight from the can.

An idea I had for this show, early on, was to paint some quick, casual versions of some signs, and then follow those up with more stylistically developed versions of the same signs.  I didn’t end up pursuing those plans, but I still wanted to do some quickies–good for warming up the hands at the start of the day.  These are maybe the best repository for those first half dozen ideas, referenced earlier, of puns, wisecracks, and snark.

This one, I took from a taxi topper, in a scene at 5:21, in this disturbing video, wherein a cabby fish refuses a pregnant turd a ride to the hospital.  Among other things that… happen…  Enjoy!

This is a sort of “found” art piece: Mickey’s been hanging out in the woodpile at the shop, since before I ever bought the shop.  His placard had had a few different texts painted on and whited out.  Shortly before 21 May, I happened across him, and decided he should be carrying a judgement day warning, as per a sign I’d seen someone carrying in a news photo somewhere.  I was tempted to put him in the window at the shop, but the vibe on the street there is plenty odd enough without attracting whatever attention Rapture Micky might attract.  Of course, when 21 May failed to bring its expected excitement, I updated to the latest apocalyptic ETA.

The text in the sign at the top of this post, regarding monetizing ignorance, came to me in a dream, one night.  I was in, I think, a laundromat.  There were TVs on, some kind of morning news talk show.  The guests were raving about some new contest which involved guessing which celebrities would mate with one another, and the exciting thing about it was that the less you knew, the better you’d do!  Win cash prizes!  My attention was on some sort of task at hand, and I couldn’t quite sort out what they were talking about–but it seemed that just might work to my advantage.

The last piece I did for the show, and which I’ve failed, thus far, to take (or find) any good pictures of (maybe a better, if more distant shot, in this story), was hung high up on the wall, above the work bench.  It’s gilded and painted on three panes of glass, which we’ll eventually install, all in a row, atop our shop front:

It asks, “What’s the sign you have been waiting for?”.  I’m sure it will be utilized by clients for whose work I’m behind on.  I ran out of time to finish it before the show, so I used the opportunity to illustrate some of the process of water gilding.  One pane is complete; the next one is gilded and backed up, awaiting removal of excess gold; and the last pane only has the drawn pattern taped to it.  Eventually, long about the time we get around to tackling our plans to cover the whole shop front in signage, these will all be finished, and hung in a row along the strip above our windows.  The lettering was inspired by that on the cover of one of James Gurney’s Moleskin notebooks.

So, altogether, I was surprised by how florid the whole display ended up being.  I mean, I know I can get florid in prose, but I didn’t anticipate working quite so many flowers into sign designs, when I started.  Not sure what I’ve learned about myself from this.

Um… I think that’s it.  Any questions?

I’ve moved the contents of our Sign Shop Diary flickr set over to a new Tumblog, because I’m always on the lookout for new things to feel guilty about ignoring! Plus, there’s that whole range between 140 characters and 5 page term paper, that neither this nor Twitter seem to encourage me to explore more of…

Although I don’t want to give too much away, here’s a sneak peek of a few pieces everyone has been working on…

Stop by and check out the show,  and see what we’ve been losing sleep over. The opening starts at 7pm.

Guerrero Gallery

2700 19th Street.

San Francisco, CA 94110

By the way, this show will not only feature the artists at New Bohemia Signs (Damon Styer, Ken Davis, Caitlyn Galloway, Heather Hardison, Aaron Cruse, Josh Luke, Corinne Matesich and Candice Obayashi), but also the amazing sign artists Jeff Canham and Steve Powers…

Hope to see you there!

That’s Canham Country!  (“Canham Country” being our nickname for our alumnus, Jeff Canham, reflecting our aspirations that his design sense overtake the nation)

My wife and I were celebrating our anniversary with a ski trip last year, when she snapped this picture of some Canham Country skis we saw:

That girl may be the most stylin’ skier I’ve ever seen (I could say that, on our anniversary, only because my wife said it first).

Anyway, this is all reminding me that I’ve no time to blog: I’ve got to get back to the grindstone, cranking out work for the upcoming show we’re sharing with Jeff and with Steve Powers, at Guerrero Gallery (opening 11 June).  That, at least, is my current excuse for having failed to blog since moving, back in March.  It’s been pretty damn busy ’round here since then!

I’ve been working recently on a sign/art piece for a client, that’s supposed to incorporate a variety of letter styles into a palimpsest of motivational words and phrases, for their company.  This video is chock full of lettering paths to pursue, and as a bonus, includes the delicious brass hook that’s always cut off in the 5000 TV ads that use the opening bars of this same RJD2 track as backing music…

Towards the end, you get a few seconds’ snippet of the trailer for this movie, which, while also full of nifty letter forms, should perhaps be prefaced with a caveat for epileptics:

Sorry to have dropped the blogging ball for so long.  My attention’s been absorbed elsewhere, not least in sorting out a new, larger space for our shop, into which we’re moving in the coming week.

To call these signs genuine and authentic practically begs people to differ.  Everyone’s got their own unique boundaries of authenticity, some of whose surely exclude our work on some technicality or other–if it’s not the cheat of drawing patterns first, maybe it’s the Electropounce™ that has replaced our hand-spun pattern wheels, or if not that, it’s certainly our top secret computerized pattern generator, busily yearning to put our Electropounce™ out to pasture.  Technicality–or technology, rather–projects one of the spectrums along which many of us might be able to locate a line (perhaps fuzzy) between authentic and not.

Clients have often called upon us to hand paint letters and logos that were never designed to be hand painted, for no other reason, near as we can tell, than the hope that, in the end, they might “look hand painted”.  Just this week, we’ve had two customers each individually use the phrase “more authenticity”, in describing what they were coming to us looking for in a sign, while providing us with digital files to work from, which themselves bore no particularly hand wrought characteristics.  What is it about what we do that implies to our clients, or to their clients, something genuine and authentic?

For better or worse, everything we produce at New Bohemia Signs is ultimately realized at the end of a hand-held paint brush.  We are limited, perhaps, by our choice of tools, but also by the quality of our practice.  The “weak link” in our production line is in our capacity to render an internally envisioned ideal, with our given set of body parts. I have to guess that that point of reduction, to humanity, to human frailty, is where we’re able to lay any claim to authenticity in what we do.  It’s from there, at any rate, that we’re able to sell authenticity to whoever’s buying.  I’ve described that point elsewhere as “the joy of fine tuning the only copier that draws its current directly from our hearts”.  I liked that line then, so I’ll use it again, and see how it fits here.  That’s how sign painting often works.  Copy, trace, cut and paste.  Whatever technological accoutrements are called upon to speed our work (or hamper our authenticity), it all passes through a needle’s eye, that of aesthetic judgement, of steady hand eye coordination, and practice, practice, practice.

We’re hoping, through this show, to call people’s attention to their own standards for genuineness and authenticity, and to spark some conversations about how they (and we) do or don’t manifest or recognize them.  As I write, work is still in progress, so as of yet I can only guess that, beyond plying clever design sense and a steady hand, we might also employ some kind of word play, or even take a stab at postmodern allusion (whatever that is)…  But if we don’t, y’know, at the very least we’ll decorate the place with a slew of genuine authentic hand painted signs.