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]

Comments

Weirdly Charming

If you’re a fan of art that makes you do a double-take, you need to check out Richard Brener . Based in the UK, Richard is an internationally collected artist who works primarily with ink, fineliners, and gouache. When you first see his pieces, they actually look pretty playful. Then you realize the entire canvas is packed with thousands of tiny, ghost-like shapes he calls "champs." They’re all squeezed together like commuters on a rush-hour train, and the level of detail is honestly mind-blowing. Richard spends hundreds of hours drawing these little guys over and over. It’s obsessive, very intentional, and a little bit wild. The cool part is that the longer you stare, the more the vibe shifts. Check out more photos below:

Where Bad Space and Good Music Collided

My first apartment was in Malate, and calling it “small” would be generous. I lived there with two girls and one guy, and to this day, I genuinely don’t know how we all fit. It felt like a magic trick. Or a health hazard. We were a musical mess. One roommate lived and breathed ’70s classics. Another was permanently blasting Korn and Slipknot. One survived solely on cheesy love songs. And me? I was floating somewhere between new wave and folk rock, pretending that made sense. Somehow, despite the noise and the chaos, we all lived together in this weird, mismatched harmony. No murders. No lawsuits. A win, honestly. My music taste now is nothing like it was in my twenties. Not even close. But I’ll always be grateful to Jacqueline for introducing me to this song in particular. It was playing when I woke up from a very memorable sleep in 2002. I was 21, half-awake, probably confused about life, and that song stuck. It still hasn’t let go.

finding cain

Search This Blog