My dad Lamar Barthet was a sign painter. He was part-time at first, doing signs after his work hours at his real job. He real job was, at first, a special delivery mailman for the post office. Then he learned drafting and got a certificate from the International Correspondence School. With that he got a job as a draftsman at American Cyanamid in Ama, Louisiana.
While there he took another correspondence course by mail, this time in sign painting, to brush up on his skills. Then his part-time job of painting signs became his full time occupation.
He painted a lot of signs in New Orleans. There were sidewalk signs, overhanging awning signs, and gold-leaf lettering on office doors. There were many truck door signs, a few billboards, and even small placards for indoor settings such as restaurants. He and some friends put up a huge billboard on Gentilly Road, and that turned out to be a major project.
His sign work became his day job, and he started a part-time night job of selling hot tamales, just to make some extra money. When he started making more money selling hot tamales than painting signs, it taught him (and me) an interesting lesson. People are willing to pay money for something good to eat, but they are not willing to pay money for the artistic design skills and sign painting artistic skills that go into laying out and painting a sign. All he could get for painting a sign was just enough money to pay for the materials (wood, paint, turpentine) and maybe a little more. He was never paid for his artistic talent and design work.
Not Charged by the Hour
When he moved to Talisheek and opened a sign shop in Slidell, he was always busy painting signs, but there again, he could barely make enough to pay for the materials. Often he didn't even charge for his time. If it took him 40 hours to paint a big sign, he charged the same amount for a sign it only took him three hours to paint. To the customer, a sign was judged by how it looks, not its size, not by how long it took to paint, nor by its intricate design.
That was a lesson for me as well. As I came to know more artists over the years, I heard the same complaint. The design skills, the countless false starts, the hand-in-brush talents (knowing what not to paint as well as what to paint) and the hardware and materials for the artwork structure, whether it be plywood, canvas, or poster board... all of that didn't count for much. All the customer saw was the finished product and its value was judged by that.
Painting a sign on a curved surface was always a challenge
So it is the life of an artist, and a sign painter, and a musician, poet, or writer. The countless hours put into the work of art aren't visible in the finished product, and that's what makes art different than, say, building a dog house.
Anyway, my dad's sign shop in Slidell, Victory Signs, put out some pretty good product: door signs, truck lettering, big billboards, small directional signs and what-not. Good thing dad had a background in drafting, because when the City of Slidell decided to pass a sign ordinance that required engineering calculations for wind load and support structural information, he was able to provide that without hiring someone else to do it.
Nowadays, most signs are produced by computers cutting out pieces of vinyl that are then peeled off and stuck on the prepared surface. Someone tried to sell dad a computerized sign-making set up in the latter days of his sign-painting career, but he wasn't ready for that and couldn't afford the computer in the first place.
Computers speed up the process considerably, especially the graphic design and lettering part, but if the surface isn't prepared right, the letters tend to curl up after time. Then there's the continuing problem of sunlight bleaching out the color red.
Dad had always wanted me to join in the sign business, and I tried once or twice to paint a sign, but my hand lettering was not good, and I never met a brush that wanted to do what I wanted it to do. I ran a few silk screen signs, and while that was okay and relatively easy to do, it still required design skills and screen production techniques that I was not familiar with.
When the price of signboard plywood went up significantly, he decided to retire from sign work, still doing one or two when requested as favors to friends or church groups. When he died, I inherited his extension ladders and scaffolding. But picking up and extending an extension ladder and setting it in place is getting too much for me. I can barely climb to the top of a six foot A-frame ladder to fill the bird feeder.
