Leslie Nichols makes portraits with a typewriter

A friend once told me that typewriters are great for when you're writing something fierce and powerful: you can pound the hell out of the keys. Your freakin MacBook wouldn't like that. Now here's another use for those humble machines: drawing portraits.

Leslie Nichols, an artist from Warren County, Kentucky, uses a Remington typewriter to create images. She began to make her one-of-a-kind textual portraits after getting a typewriter as a gift and, upon deciding that she wasn't bound to be a writer, began to use it to create fascinating works of art.

Leslie has a BFA from Fontbonne University and an MA from Western Kentucky University. She has displayed works in more than one hundred exhibitions at venues including the Huntsville Museum of Art, the Carnegie Center for Visual and Performing Arts, and the Evansville Museum.

In the five-minute clip, embedded below, Leslie talks about her text-based portraiture and takes us through her working process.

[h/t: Women's Studio Workshop]

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