DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

 

Language is meant to flow like water.  It conveys meaning through cadence and syntax, tone and undertone.  It is the river in which our minds swim and spawn and take the bait.  Fragment and blow it up and find the weirdness in it, as you would find the odd creatures in a drop of river water seen under a microscope.

The English language is littered with mismatched characters and syllables and ideas, a jumbled rummage sale.

Words on signs aren’t just signifiers, they’re physical objects that poke out, catch the light, rust, run in the rain.

Alphanumeric characters are wrought of our fundamental elements of form.  They become abstracted by accident, or by design.

All these pictures are from New York.  The city’s characteristic graphic mode is uppercase bold, and as long as a sign communicates no one has time to polish the raggedy edges.

Heavy fonts in all caps speak with chesty syncopation.

Script fonts sing.  Big and bold script fonts are Broadway belters, pitching the tune to the cheap seats.

“Mosaic” is thought to be from the same root as “museum” and “muse”, but spelled the same way the word also means “having to do with Moses”, the Hebrew liberator and lawgiver.  Words in mosaic form look old and authoritative, even when they’re new.

Words as signs cast shadows and coexist with all the manifestations of Nature.

Big words are styled to give aesthetic force to what they signify, to convey qualities like whimsy, modernity, or sobriety.

Many big signs these days are overly familiar corporate branding and generic marketing, but you still see a lot of high-spirited 20th century design.

Like the babble of voices in a crowd, words on display can get lost in the layers and dissolve into multicolored noise.

Sometimes I see hidden messages in segments of words.

Some words shake their booties like shameless drunks.

Others proudly proclaim their dullness and conformity.

Basking on glass, a word is projected on the underlying soft fabric.

Choose me!  I am exotic in a fun and happy way.

I dare to be illegible but dashing, an arabesque in gridland.

We have everything you could want, and all of it is all lit up.

In all the jumble and agita of the hard world, we offer you light and color and atmosphere.

Curvy swooping lines that sell a fantasy of elegant luxury contrast or merge with the jagged overlay of winter survivors.

Rustic and quirky means wholesome and real.

That’s in contrast to the traditional corporate style, respectable intimidation.

Neon words are spelled with bent tubes of glass holding luminous gas, little labyrinths of light.

Stone words are the traditions that stand through the centuries, defying the ephemeral.

Shiny metal is the dazzle of the technological era.

A word can be like a vine, florid and tentacular.

Another word embodies the neatness and assertive simplicity of the modern style, even amid a jungle of decor.

Fun can be manufactured on an industrial scale.

Silliness and idiosyncracy can be picked up in a shop.

We can make you think of the most intimate sensory experiences while you navigate the canyon of towers.

When you come to a corner, hang a 90 and keep on trucking.

Pop art is all about abstracting icons and remixing ideas in the field of commerce.

It takes some patina to fulfill the classical style.

When the power is turned off, the word means its opposite.

Letters condensed to be readable from one angle look like broken stairsteps when seen from another angle.

In our time we are not ashamed of our desires.  They are the meaning of our lives!

It is all about getting and getting more and more.

Even when it is all eroding out from under us, we shall consume.

The only alternative to satiating our desires is lashing out in our anger!