ToldemArt

I am an artist fascinated by words and language. I love the music I hear in speech and have always pictured the letters dancing in my head. They dance themselves into images that I then doodle onto paper. My first memory of taking a word image out of my head and putting it onto paper was when I was in the second grade and had an unkind thought for my very kind teacher. I don’t remember the reason for the thought but, since I had a pencil in my hand, I felt driven to doodle it into my notebook. And, since I didn’t want to get caught expressing something unkind about that very kind teacher, I drew the words as the image the letters had formed in my head. My teacher saw what I was doing and commented on my beautiful “abstract” drawing. She then lectured me on why I shouldn’t doodle in my notebook or at all for that matter when I was supposed to be concentrating on my work. The uncontrollable desire to doodle would never leave me—in school, in business, and at home. Old friends have framed artwork that I doodled onto paper napkins and left behind after meals. I’ve got a framed etching in my office—doodled with a needle onto a scrap of zinc plate and printed on a paper towel. My parents encouraged my “artistic tendencies” while having no idea my peculiar inclination could ever be put to practical use. So, I graduated from college with a degree in art and then worked briefly as an art therapist before working in advertising, a marble factory in Italy, medical illustration, typesetting, graphic design, illustration, editing and publishing, marketing communications, publications management, university communications, hotel ownership, personal training, and corporate account management (or, more precisely, professional apologizing). BLOCK Letters was budding for years. It finally blossomed as a business concept during an especially unsatisfying period in my mostly unsatisfying professional life when I sat in an editorial meeting and, just like that second-grader, doodled into my notebook what I was really thinking. [That design is only for the eyes of potty mouths. If that’s what you are, just email me and I’ll send you the link.] When the creative director looked at the image and, having no idea what it was created from, said, “Hey, dude, that’s awesome,” it dawned on me my passion for words and images might be the professional passion I had been searching for. I gave up designing with my pen to designing with my computer.