When I knocked on Carolyn Macartney’s door last week, I looked down and realized I was wearing a pair of her pants; I'd copped them at her moving sale a few days earlier.
Small town life can be a closed loop. When people leave Marfa, many of their possessions stay behind, finding their way into other lives (and apparently, sometimes right back to that person’s doorstep). This ensures that a person’s influence is felt long after they leave, lingering in closets, kitchens and living rooms. But Carolyn’s influence is present on every street - she’s leaving behind an aesthetic legacy in West Texas that has quietly shaped the feeling of the entire town.
Carolyn is a sign painter and her portfolio is vast: she’s painted signs for The Sentinel, Among My Souvenirs, Sticks and Bones, and Filth Mart, to name a few (really, a few - there are many, many more). In fact, our West Texas Wonders logo and our Desert Dispatch logo were both designed by Carolyn.
Catching Carolyn on the job was like a fantastic, desert version of “Where’s Waldo?” - there’s Carolyn on a ladder on South Austin, kneeling in front of a window on Highland, or painting on stucco on West El Paso. Her presence signaled the arrival of something new.
“Part of the appeal is that you are able to do ‘art’ but in concert with the needs of the client and in service to the purpose of the sign,” Carolyn wrote in an email. “So at the end of the day, usefulness is the key and that takes a lot of ego out of it. Kind of like in Islamic art, think geometric tile work, where it is about the resulting space, not the person who did it. For me there's a lot of beauty in that.”
Carolyn spent her childhood in England, where she learned italics in school (she was awarded a fountain pen for being so good at them). Her family moved to the states and finished high school in Houston, which she hated. “Texas was for me very much a superficially focused society for women,” she said. “Your responsibilities were to be cute, buxom and stupid, and I was none of those things.”
Carolyn had always been interested in art - “I was always the kid doing the pictures and the paintings,” she said - but that interest wasn’t encouraged. Her father was a geologist and hoped she’d go into a “practical” line of work.
“This is the ‘80s or the ‘70s where you do not become an artist,” she said. “You become something useful to society.”
Carolyn signed up for mostly math and science classes at Smith College, but ended up taking a calligraphy class on the side. She learned the entire roman alphabet - the “excruciating detail” of it - and became aware of lettering and typography in a way she hadn’t before.
It wasn’t until many years later, after committing herself to art and working as a painter, cinematographer and film professor, that her mind wandered back to lettering. While walking around a bookstore, a sign painting book caught her eye: “I'd never thought of it as a thing,” she said. That moment spurred a “fantasy” about sign painting, and an immediate desire to dive in.
Given her background in painting, she thought it would be easy. She immediately went out and bought a fancy brush and the proper (highly toxic) paint. But, she soon found out it was wildly difficult, and the paint smelled terrible.
“I thought I was a good painter. You're having your self esteem dashed to the ground,” she said, laughing. “Good sign painting is the culmination of a whole bunch of tiny subtleties, like any other craft.”
Those subtleties mean materials - different brushes (she flopped her hand back and forth to imitate the fine squirrel hair brush she uses for glass), paints, and brushstrokes - different inspiration (‘80s cigarette packaging is the main one for Carolyn) and also, different physical movements. Sign painting is an extremely responsive art.
“Every time you breathe or slow down, all that appears in the brushstroke, right?” she said. “So if you stop, there's a blop. If you slow down, there's a blop. It shows all that.”
The sign painting fantasy went hand in hand with a different fantasy - one of moving to West Texas.
“This is where you should listen to your fantasies,” Carolyn said, smiling. “You come out here and you taste the air, you feel the light, you feel the space, it has a very special feel here that feels good to humans.”
Carolyn painted one sign in Dallas, but her sign painting career officially took off here. It just so happens that her first sign gig in Marfa was our Marfa Public Radio logo on the front of our building.
“Somehow,” she said, “the fantasy came true.”
“It’s not a throwback art, exactly,” I told Carolyn, “but there’s something nostalgic about hand painted signs. Maybe because they look tactile? Like someone actually painted them, no machines involved.” She nodded. In our tech-oversaturated world, a hand-painted sign scratches some itch for a world untouched by computers, for work that’s distinctly human. Work that has the potential for blops.
“I think maybe that's why people want to buy art, because it’s so obviously done by a person,” she said. “Music is exactly the same thing. There's been plenty of opportunities to have entirely machine-generated music. We still persist in playing with these awkward instruments and all of these really inconvenient ways to make sounds. And we're still at it because it sounds better to us.”
For Carolyn, Marfa has been an amazing stage for this kind of work.
“This town is filled with the most skilled, high-end trades people,” she said. “The welders, the carpenters, the architects. There are such high standards aesthetically in Marfa, so you want to meet those high aesthetic standards because there's nothing more public than signs, right?”
And on some basic level, Carolyn says it’s deeply satisfying to see lettering painted on windows and walls.
“Suddenly there is life to that dead wall,” she said. “And it's utilitarian - signs are awesome because they're telling you something you actually really need to know. A sign is telling me that this is a motel, and this is room number three, and I need to push the door. It appeals to my instilled depression-era parents values of practicality and usefulness.”
It’s true: without signs, how would we know where we are, or have any sense of place?
After shaping our understanding of this region, Carolyn is headed to another desert town, Joshua Tree, where she’s leaving sign painting behind to focus on her own work. However, it’s a hard art to shake – while scoping out California, she walked into a store and mentioned she painted signs. The owner was interested. So, Carolyn said, she might paint one more.
Caló
Trastes - a normally plural noun that means the general set of eating ware, that is, the plates and bowls as well as the forks, spoons and knives. The Spanish word for the same is platos (plates) and cubiertos (silverware). Because tortillas served as both plates and silverware in many households along the Rio Grande for a long time, trastes came to mean everything that went on the table except the tortillas. It was what you brought out of the cupboards for guests. For you only set out a stack of tortillas in a towel or waxcloth if you were feeding only your immediate family.
Caló is a borderland dialect. You can find more episodes here.
Other programming:
After a fire erupted at an industrial facility on the outskirts of Odessa earlier this summer, some nearby residents are now suing over the environmental contamination they say it’s causing. Marfa Public Radio’s Mitch Borden has the story here.
Singer Juan Gabriel was one of Mexico's most beloved music icons. His journey from the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez to superstardom is both inspiring and complex, and it’s now the subject of a podcast called “My Divo” from Futuro Studios. Marfa Public Radio's Alberto De Leon spoke with journalist and Futuro Studios Executive Editor Maria Garcia, the podcast’s host. Listen to their conversation here.
PSAs
Marfa Live Arts presents - from Guadalajara, Mexico - magician Mago Krypto, who will be performing Labor Day weekend at the Marfa Lights Festival on Saturday, August 31.
The award winning illusionist will be taking the center stage in front of the Presidio County Courthouse at noon, right after the festival parade.
More information at marfalivearts.org
If you have PSAs you'd like to hear on the air or see in this newsletter, head to www.marfapublicradio.org/psa.
