Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 22, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 June 1901 — PAINTING BIG SIGNS. [ARTICLE]

PAINTING BIG SIGNS.

Artists who devote their talent TO ADVERTISING purposes. Some of Them Have Had Years of Training- In Drawing and Color Work, and Some Have Studied In Famous Old World Ateliers. Although the vivid advertisements of the excellences of foods, ointments, clothing, all mechanical appliances known to man and a thousand other things never dreamed of in the philosophy of a hundred years ago are continually catching the eye and possibly shocking the artistic sensibilities of the beholder, few of the ordinary observers giye a moment’s question to the makers of advertisements. The advertising craze has grown of late to such huge and unlovely proportions that any brief account fails to explain its workings. The office of a large advertising concern is one of the busiest places in town. Artists are constantly appearing with designs for the firm, a small army of men with paint pots and brushed are hovering about waiting to be sent out, and everywhere are gay evidences of the results of all this labor. “Who are the men that paint these ‘heroic’ pictures one sees on unused walls and lofty fences?’’ asked a reporter of one of the men who keeps these subordinates busy. “They are not the people you think them, I fancy,” was the answer. “Instead of being daubers, with about the ability necessary to wield a whitewash brush, our best men are real artists. By this I mean that many of them have had years of training in drawing and color work. Several of them have studied abroad in the ateliers of well known men. A man whom I saw’ painting a head on a wall yesterday is a night instructor in a Brooklyn art school. Recently one of our men painted on a large wall the biggest portrait ever attempted. He had studied five years in the Paris art schools.” “Why do they take up this work?” “The other doesn’t pay. It’s a case of ‘commercialism in art.’ They find that they can’t make the real thing pay, so they come to this common calling. There’s money in it. Why, our star painters get SSO a week. The daubers, who put in backgrounds, don’t earn more than $lO or sls a

week.” The men who paint the designs in various inaccessible and conspicuous places have with them small copies of the designs to be reproduced. Long experience makes them expert in accurately tracing the design upon the chosen surface. Although the familiar advertisements scattered over the city seem exactly alike and one face seems the exact counterpart of another, yet closer inspection will show various points of difference. In the case of a very familiar picture which is displayed from one end of the United States to the other, when it was first brought out one man was hired for the sole purpose of painting that one design, and to do this he traveled from Maine to California. “Not the least of our difficulties,” said the advertising man, “is finding places to put our signs. We hire men who do nothing else but go about and obtain permission from owners to put up billboards on their premises, use a vacant wall or decorate a fence or a roof. It needs great tact to do this. When there are objections, they must be overcome, and after this is done the owner often gets the idea that his available space is worth thousands of dollars to us and to him. The experiences of advertising men among farmers and tramps would make a mighty interesting x book.” “Why do you say tramps?” “Oh, the tramps are our worst enemies. They build fires behind our billboards and burn them or else tear them down out of sheer wantonness.” When asked about the price a blank brick wall in a conspicuous part of New York would bring to its owner if he let it for advertising purposes, the advertising man laughed and said he could not tell that, but he did not mind saying that he was now paying $6,000 a year rent for a wall in the middle of the shopping district. “This is not an unusual sum to pay,” he added, “for such prominent positions.” Advertising firms are liberal subscribers to all art magazines, particularly to those French art periodicals which display the newest drawings of the still popular poster. The ideas of the foreign artists are taken freely and converted into gaudy designs for advertising the latest song or a new cigar without the least compensation, since, as the advertisers assert, American ideas are assimilated abroad Just as unceremoniously. Not all the large reproductions of figures and faces on our streets and along the roof tops are handwork. Many of them are machine made. By a process akin to that of making lithographs machines have been Invented to lay the colors automatically. The finished product, quite devoid of personality, presents accurately a copy of the working design.—New York Post.