The first practical typewriter was invented by Charles Thurber and patented in 1843, but was it never manufactured. Charles Thurber’s typewriter patent, 1843 But what is typewriter art anyway? The definition, Tullett argues, is both very broad and very personal:įor some artists, it is an object to draw - from the machine itself, to the ephemera associated with it (typewriter oils, ribbon cases and so on) - or an object to make art from, whether that be the music of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra, or sculptural pieces and explorations… For others, however, the typewriter is a tool to draw with a means of making art. What makes this unusual art form so enchanting is that it blends the compositional drama of drawing with the patterned precision of the machine.
Nichols creates large-scale text pieces with hand-stamped oil-based inks and stenciled graphite smaller, more intimate pieces are produced entirely with a manual typewriter.
Her typewriter text portraits are driven by a desire to understand different facets of women’s rights and identity as well as her place, and sense of womanhood, in her own community. Trained as a traditional painter, Nichols now combines texts with images to create mixed-media landscapes and portraits. ‘Looking Forward’ by Leslie Nichols (2010) The product and legacy of that is what graphic design scholar Barrie Tullett explores in Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology ( public library) - a fascinating chronicle of “the development of the typewriter as a medium for creating work far beyond anything envisioned by the machine’s makers,” embedded in which is a beautiful allegory for how all technology is eventually co-opted as an unforeseen canvas for art and political statement. Hubbard was writing at the dawn of an unusual new art form, wherein artists were appropriating a new thing - a trailblazing technology - to find a new way of making art. “Art is not a thing - it is a way,” Elbert Hubbard observed in 1908 in what became one of history’s finest definitions of art.