The Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those just slightly off to the side). Every other Wednesday, we look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" was also the theme of MAKE Volume 17
When I was a tween, one Saturday afternoon, my dad and I went to the barbershop to get our hair cut. Outside the shop, an elderly man was standing there painting a new sign on the replaced plate glass window (which vandals had recently smashed). Walking by, I was mesmerized by the painter, deep in a kind of Zen-like concentration as he worked, his large, beat-up and paint-smeared wooden toolbox overflowing with brushes and small cans of paint, his palette, his maul stick, all of it was so novel and wondrous to me.
Inside the barbershop, as my dad got his hair cut, and then as I got mine, sitting in the cast iron barber's chair (which also always fascinated me) right by the window, I was transfixed, watching the painter work. I couldn't get over the idea that those nearly perfect letterforms, with their thick drop shadows, and the starbursts and other ornaments he was so effortlessly creating -- all flowed so confidently from his hand, held steady by the maul stick pressed to the glass. It looked like flourishes of magic. I'd already been interested in art and graphic design by then, but this experience made me become even more interested in pursuing commercial art as a career (which I ended up doing). It's amazing how, in one's life, a small, seemingly mundane encounter like this can have such a disproportional impact. I still think about that elderly signwriter (what sign painters are called), outside the small town barbershop in Chesterfield, Virginia, every time I see a handpainted sign.
But these signs and building-side advertisements (sometimes called "brickads") are very much a fading artform. But like a lot of dead or dying media, the form has found an avid and growing following online. There are a number of Flickr pools devoted to old and new handpainted signage, and online archives of "ghostsigns," signs from decades (or centuries) past that are all but fading away. The art of the "walldog," a slang term for signwriters, will not be forgotten. And like a lot of retro commercial arts, such as letterpress printing, there are some who claim that handpainted signs are even making a comeback.
Here are a few resources to check out: