John Downer: Pro in the dying art of sign painting

OCEAN PARK – When asked how it feels being a professional in the dying art of sign painting, John Downer, 58, eldest son of Lucille Downer, says, “I miss talking shop with the old timers but it’s something I just have to accept.”

“I’m discouraged by the lack of company – I don’t miss talking to young knuckleheads but I used to love talking to Judd Greene, who was in my grandfather’s generation.”

“He lived a stone’s throw from the corner of Joe John and the back road and did a lot of sign painting all over the Peninsula,” adds Downer.

According to local artist Marie Powell, Judd Greene’s daughter, “My father painted signs for 60 years. He apprenticed in Seattle and worked for King County and had his own business in Kent before moving to the Peninsula.”

“He painted signs for Jack’s Country Store and all the charter boat operators. He made signs for Nautical Brass, Coho Charters, the Shelburne Inn,” says Powell. “He painted lettering on trucks and boats and delivery vehicles. He died in 1994, but some of his signs may still be around.”

The art of sign painting used to be one that required an apprenticeship and acceptance by peers in a union.

Young men – in fact Downer admits there were no women in the sign painting union – found a shop to work in and worked with a master sign painter for years before being qualified. Downer and his generation appear to be the last that benefited from this system.

Downer is in town for part of the summer to get away from ragweed allergies in Iowa City, Iowa, his home. So, Jack’s Country Store, founded by his father Jack Downer and now owned and managed by brother Tom Downer, has a sign painter back in residence until mid-September.

As John Downer rifles through hand lettered signs in his small studio across from Jack’s he points to a large wooden sign hanging on the wall above his drawing table.

In bold, green lettering it says ‘Chamber of Commerce, Ocean Park.’

“That’s one of Judd’s,” says Downer, “look at that capital ‘R’ in Park – that’s a classic Judd ‘R.'”

Though hand painted signs have gone the way of hand-churned butter or tatting, in the digital world of computers, typefaces – or fonts – are still important. Downer is both an expert in hand lettering and famous for several of the fonts he has designed.

A typeface or font is a particular style for a set of characters and letters. Each typeface – with names like Courier or Times New Roman, for instance – has a particular design for all letters of the alphabet, both capitals and lower case letters, a set of numbers and also ligatures for certain letters that need to be connected when adjacent to one another.

Originally all printed matter was created by setting type, one letter at a time, and the ‘face’ of the type made the impression, hence the name.

“My most famous fonts are probably Roxy, Iowan Old Style, and Brothers,” says Downer.

His fonts are licensed through font publishers such as The Font Bureau, Bitstream, and Emigre among others.

Downer credits his father Jack – who worked in his own father’s print shop and later newspaper office – with his early interest in drawing and lettering, although it appears that John was talented in drawing from an early age.

“Even when I was a two-year-old, if someone said to me, ‘draw a cat,’ I’d draw something that really looked like a cat,” Downer says, “I think drawing is really a matter of seeing carefully and then transferring that image to paper.”

Downer also exhibited an early aptitude for lettering and writing.

“I wanted to decode cursive writing when I was in kindergarten,” he shares. “I saw it as the lingua franco of adults and I wanted to crack the code.”

“I had a burning desire to be able to render letters to be totally convincing to adult eyes. Even in kindergarten I wanted to be able to fake my mother’s longhand writing,” he laughingly shares.

“I was writing my name in cursive in first grade even though it was prohibited until third grade by my elementary school.”

Downer was born in Tacoma and eventually the family moved to Longview where John went to Monticello Junior High School and then R. A. Long High School.

Downer’s interest in graphics and lettering was nurtured in elementary and early junior high school by a strange set of circumstances – many Puget Sound area public school art classrooms owned copies of “The Speedball Textbook” for lettering due to the celebrity of letterer Ross George of Seattle.

Downer also benefited by studying with an art instructor who had been taught by a disciple of Lloyd Reynolds, a well-known calligrapher teaching at Reed College in Portland.

After these early beginnings, Downer continued his lettering and graphics studies at Washington State University and eventually moved to the University of Iowa, earning an MFA in painting.

The University of Iowa has a well-known creative writing program – writing, font design and lettering go hand in hand so Downer decided to stay on.

Downer has an eloquence with a pen or pencil that is readily apparent – he draws to illustrate his points about the correct proportion of letters, the relationship between letters and how styles of lettering have changed over time.

An international expert in his field, Downer was asked by noted font designer Jean-François Porchez to comment on photographs of signage and lettering design in the Parisian suburb of Malakoff. Downer was also a featured presenter at a recent gathering of typeface experts in St. Petersburg, Russia.

His eye is indeed keen as he critiques the signage of local businesses in downtown Ocean Park. Walking in a local shop, he says, “This sign painter was less convincing with a brush – look how poorly that sign reads – but his chalk work is of better quality.”

“Few people have a trained eye for graphic design or font style,” he laments. “I lobbied for three years just to get into a shop for my apprenticeship to a master sign painter – and I eventually earned my journeyman card from the union in Des Moines, Iowa.”

“Now that system doesn’t exist anymore,” he adds.

The digital age has revolutionized the printing industry, but the importance of a readable, even beautiful, typeface is still paramount whether on the page or on the screen.

“Technology comes to the city first,” says Downer, “trends in modern techniques seep into the populated places. Then they eventually flood the country.”

But for a brief period every summer, one place on the Peninsula has truly stepped back in time – when John Downer escapes the ragweed of Iowa to create hand painted signs for tomatoes, pork chops, and soap for the windows and aisles of Jack’s Country Store.