Stuart Emms

The other day I was in Providence, a shop in town, and the owner showed me her web site . At the top of the page was a beautiful painted sign that the shop had used when it operated out of a market stall. She asked me if I knew Stuart Emms who was the sign writer who had painted it, I had to admit that I did and that I am staying with him (and his wife Geddy) at the moment.

I first met Stuart, fifteen years ago, when I happened on him painting a shop sign on Mill Rd, I sat down on a wall across the road and watched him work for an hour or so (I wasn't busy that day), we got talking and have been friends ever since. His studio was in Neils Yard, two minuets walk down the road from my then home & studio and I'd step down there during a break to scroung a cup of tea and a fag. He was acknowledged as the best sign writer in Cambridge right up to the time when he retired and his brush work is still brilliant and inspiring to see.

Stuart Emms.

I've come to love brush lettering. I read Father Catiches "Origin of the Serif" back in 2000 and since then I've been playing with brushes. Before I discovered painting letters I would draw out the design, refining and refining, often I came to think that I'd refined the life out of the original idea. Now I'll work the drawing to a point where I'm happy with the spacing and proportion of the letters and then run a brush through it, bringing back life and freshness to the design. Before I went to America I used the chisel ended brush and then, in the US, I was introduced to the ticket writers brush at the JSS. Recently I've just started playing with sign writing brushes and if coming to grips with the ticket writers brush was difficult the sign writers brush is a hundred times more troublesome. Each of these brushes have different strengths and I think they improve my work as a Letterer.

Just along the road from Providence is a row of shops where the college landlord insists that the signage is sign written instead of the now more normal industrially produced crap. A haven from the rest of the town which is littered with soulless computer designed plastic shit and corporate logos that bear no sympathy with the buildings that they're inflicted on. There's something very human about a beautifully sign written work and I challenge any one to find more charm in the industrial alternative. In the lettering community sign writing was always the poor relation, but I think that now that its lost the battle with computer designed signage and is becoming rarer and rarer to find, I think its status will rise and the rest of us will realize how much we lost with its disappearance from our streets.