THE ART PROCESS: Hand Lettering

Hand Lettering - a disintegrating art form, a losing profession. It doesn’t matter, though, because Margaret Kilgallen practiced the process of hand made signs and lettering with exquisite energy. Approaching human nature and mother nature with clear eyes, her work was colossal in both scale and understanding of her human task.

Margaret (Oct 28, 1967 - June 26, 2001) was an influential San Francisco Bay Area contemporary/folk artists. She was part of the Bay Area Mission School art movement as well as the critically acclaimed touring exhibit, Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture. 

“I like things that are handmade and I like to see people’s hand in the world, anywhere in the world; it doesn’t matter to me where it is. And in my own work, I do everything by hand. I don’t project or use anything mechanical, because even though I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, my hand will always be imperfect because it’s human. And I think it’s the part that’s off that’s interesting, that even if I’m doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I’ll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that’s where the beauty is.”

Margaret Kilgallen, ART 21 [click here to watch interview]

- Jess Petrella