Postering in the Dark

I joined a group of lawless wheat-paste posterers the other night, driving around the city with a tub of water and a cheesecloth covered mason jar full of flour. T_ and L_ are the guys behind Beautiful Angle who go out once a month armed with a stack of freshly printed heavy paper, some staples and a well thought out route, covering the city with their unique brand of underground art.

Sweetie has liked their posters for a while now and over the course of the past year or so, started to email back and forth with T_ . We ran into them at a local bar a while back when Sweetie recognized one of them. T_ lost half of his finger in an unfortunate bookcase-building incident at the start of the year and made it easy to spot him I guess. Of course that’s just Sweetie really; she has an eye for that kind of detail.

They were really surprised to be outed in public like that, but it led to an invitation for dinner over at T_’s house and that led to a request for me to write a poster for them. That up there in the corner is what I came up with, with L_ doing the graphic design and the colors. L_ has an old copy press machine from the 1950’s that uses real old-style type. It’s one of the last models to still use movable type and he has drawers full of different lead fonts and a few sets of wooden ones all of which get used in the posters. Nothing about the machine is automated. It’s a copy press that’s designed to be used for one-offs back in the day when all editing was done by eye. It’s a hand crank and every piece of paper has to be attached and unattached after every turn. Since these posters had three colors it took three separate sessions to get them all finished -- Letting each layer dry completely before adding the next.

When T_ asked me to write the words for their lastest poster, he gave me some parameters to work with and talked about where the latest poster ideas have been coming from. I wanted something that talked about Commencement Bay and how from Mt. Rainier to the Puyallup River basin, this area has always taken care of those who have lived here. Even to those who’s living here was more a detriment then a gift.

I know it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for this town, but past the mountain and the sound she is also beautiful in the most unexpected ways. It seems to me that’s what T_ and L_ mean when they call themselves Beautiful Angle. It’s what makes Sweetie and I love their posters even more.

When you can see a dandelion for the flower, then an entire parking lot becomes a sea of gold.

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