Preserving neon in paint
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 280 : Jul 8–14, 2010
“If the sign designer did their job, all I have to do is really look for the right angle for my composition,” says painter Eric Mecum, 42, who has been documenting the city’s disappearing neon signs on canvas since 2003.
Each painting starts with one of the hundreds of photographs the artist has taken over the years whenever he spots a vintage sign from the street. The resulting pieces showcase the way the sun throws shadows across the letters, or the pale translucency of the neon tubes, eccentricities that are difficult to capture by photography. He’s also begun cutting his canvases to mirror the contours of the actual signs, giving the paintings an odd perspective that he describes as “a complete accident,” albeit “a very cool accident.” These shaped canvases, like his paintings Little Big and Motel, blur the lines between the actual sign and the painting of the sign.
But his work comes with a sense of urgency. “I’d say preservation takes precedence over painting now,” he says. “These old signs are disappearing, and I’ll grab a picture just to have an image before it’s torn down and replaced with plastic garbage.”
It seems fitting that a pop-art painter of neon signs—blazing symbols of the modern advertising age—would hail from California, where Route 66 ends and Hollywood Boulevard pulses with neon. Mecum is a self-taught painter who first put brush to canvas in college in 1988. He was inspired to paint the hard lines and shadows of urban landscapes and signs by his father, an engineer and draftsman, and photorealist painters from the ’60s and ’70s. As for the appeal of neon specifically, Mecum explains, “It’s classic Americana: [the] construction, lines, the shadows the neon makes.”
His move to Chicago in 2003 reignited his interest in preserving vintage neon signs in paint. After ten years working for Pollstar, a music-industry trade publication, Mecum found work as a consultant for a moving company in Pilsen until he was laid off more than a year ago.
Now living in Ukrainian Village, Mecum says his neon paintings have picked up some pretty impressive fans. Two of his pieces hang in Harris Bank’s private collection in its Chicago headquarters. Another windfall came when he brought a 4’ x 6’ painting of the Chicago Theatre to the 2008 Artists Project—an exhibition of independent artists at the Merchandise Mart’s annual Artropolis fair. “This guy walked in my booth and said, ‘I love that! I’d love it more if it wasn’t one of my competitors!’?” That man was Lou Raizin, president of Broadway in Chicago. Six months later, Mecum was commissioned to paint the Oriental Theatre’s marquee as a thank-you gift for the producers of Wicked.
Mecum’s hope for the future is a studio that gives him the space to paint larger pieces and create a number of series he’s been developing in his head (one on pools, another on tricycles). “My subjects jump around, but neon was the very first subject that I embraced and you never forget your first time,” the artist says. His favorite sign in Chicago is the massive marquee of the Music Box Theatre. “It’s got just so much steel, for a movie-theater sign,” he says. It’s the subject of one of Mecum’s works-in-progress and is about 60 percent complete: “That means there’s about 100 more hours of work to go,” he says.
See Mecum’s work at the Swell Gallery (123½ Main St, West Dundee; swellgallery.com), starting July 31, or visit ericmecum.com.
- CW
