Jan 8, 2010 | Recent Posts, Signs I Like |
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Here is a sign I could not resist from my recent two-week photo and art journey in Mexico. Given the healthcare debate going on in America and that Bartell's has just decided to stop filling Medicare prescriptions in my illustrious hometown of Seattle it's nice to think that you could go to the very small and very dusty ranchero village of El Tuito and still find some Esperanza in the Farmacia (it was a long long sign, so I cropped out the first word.) I especially like the attitude of friendship, humble yet eager, offered by the first E, the wind-up of the S, which tilts backwards as though just gathering strength to race forward, and the inimitable and ultra simple A's with the weight placed on the left rather than the right side rather as though that leg has been sprained and wrapped in extra bandages. Not to mention the diminutive 10 watt lightbulb. It takes very little illumination in Mexico to make the heart warm and the spirit lifted up.
Dec 13, 2009 | Recent Posts
When my tech savior came over one day to troubleshoot my computer he asked if by any chance I also had any old computers I needed to dispose of. I pointed to several in the boneyard outside my studio and admitted sheepishly that I had never been able to figure out how to erase the hard drives, and that was why the Old Grey Macs lived next to the compost bags and flowerpots instead of being recycled.
Tim offered me three options: he would take the computers to a recycling place where they would claim to erase the hard drives with no guarantee; I could pay the recyclers for a certificate of destruction guaranteeing unequivocally that no, they had not looked at my old love letters; or….he could take them out to the shooting range.
Thank you Tim Hannon, of Sound Support, for the ultimate wild west solution to privacy.
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Just as I am confident that Tim will figure out the next Terrible Trauma of the disappearing photo disk and other stories I now rest easy knowing that no one will ever read the last 8 years of my email……
Dec 11, 2009 | Recent Posts, Signs I Like
Photographs © Ernest Hilsenberg
These two signs from Ernest Hilsenberg's recent travels in Costa Rica have everything I covet in a piece of art. Texture, mystery, distress, elegance. And instructions for what you can and cannot do. Look at the exquisitely wrong letter spacing between the u and the m, the caprice of the flourished N, the vapor of smoke. Not to mention the shimmering ghost of the silver cigarette and the restrained iconography for "no."
As for the billboard, who needs Photoshop when you have weather and wallpaper paste? The color palette is classic Russian Constructivist.
Nov 25, 2009 | Signs I Like
Here is a weather-appropriate sequence as we enter the Thanksgiving weekend. Sent to me by photographer John Kane, whose work I first encountered during Tieton Days in Mighty Tieton, Eastern Washington. You will see this classic emblem of accommodations communication on the road to Fordair just north of Coulee City.
You can see more of John's work at http://www.johnakane.com
Oct 23, 2009 | Recent Posts, Signs I Like
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Just below this sign there is a stair, and it leads down. I found it on an oddly balmy gray day in October, an almost eerily gray day when small differences in tone cried out for distinction. This discreet invitation to hell peeks out from the bleachers at the end of Greenlake, where athletes leap the Mayan-temple-sized stairs and below them rowers whistle for their boats.
Designer, calligrapher, lettering artist. 