I wrote the following sometime in 2015…
“The signature is the last of the personal expressions as marks that most of all us partake in. It is the most primitive of our mark on the world that we are making now. I still have letters saved from decades ago, and my mom has letters she has saved from when she was a kid but no one is saving our letters anymore. We don’t write them. No one in one hundred years will untie a delicate bundle of letters written by soldiers from the wars of today that are sent back home. We have text, phone calls, Facebook , twitter. Immediate and powerful but transient and not very private. Certainly not in our control. You might look for some of these writings years from now and you will not find them because you don’t own them. Facebook owns them or some mysterious entity or corporation will own them. They will own our images. We don’t see it coming but it’s coming. This new world will view creativity as the enemy because creativity is powerful and individual and tapped in.
And so I encourage you to make marks on paper, scrape away at wood, paint on your walls. Speak. Let your thoughts come out . Don’t stay blind to the dampening down that is happening. Don’t lose your individual voice. And maybe it just starts with your signature. Everyone has one and it’s unique. It’s an artwork, albeit stylized and formalized but it’s a pattern and within its design your personality is entwined.”