The Neon Jungle

Anthony & the Robot...

2011-05-02T12:10:00.000-07:00

Sign/painting custom-made for Anthony's loft...

A quick trip to Chicago...

2011-02-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

...and a few vintage signs on a cold, winter day:

Lighting up the Town...

2011-02-01T11:17:00.000-08:00

...interview in the Daily Texan by Julie Tran...

When local sign maker and artist Evan Voyles was a boy, his favorite sign was the Terminix bug. Perched on a pole at the intersection of 12th Street and Lamar Boulevard, the bug fascinated Voyles with its big, glowing lightbulb eyes, metal antenna and huge wings.

“It would turn, and it had an up lit in that kind of nemesis way,” Voyles said.

Voyles, 52, said he remembers getting pizza from across the street with his father, and then asking his dad to drive their Peugeot 404 around the block again and again to look at the life-sized insect. With the sunroof open, the bug looked like it was out to get them — and that was thrilling, he said.

That sort of thrill is what Voyles said he hopes to give Austinites as they drive or walk down South Congress Avenue. From the Homeslice girl throwing pizza dough in the air to the cowboy roping while riding a rabbit on top of Uncommon Objects, Voyles amplifies the quirks and spectacles of South Congress with his one-of-a-kind neon and vintage signs.

Voyles has made at least 500 signs with The Neon Jungle, the company he named after what his mother used to call Burnet Road in the mid-1950s, when it had raunchy neon lights.

Shops with Voyles’ signs include Yard Dog, Stella Blue, Woodland, Maya Star, Hotel San Jose and his wife’s boutique, Blackmail.

A Yale University English grad, Voyles said writing made him to go out and search for stories. After attending college and dropping out of three law schools, Voyles went on the road, where his obsession with Americana took off.
He was driving in the middle of nowhere, north of the Texas border in New Mexico in March 1989 when he passed a little junk store, with things strewn across the desert, most half-covered in sand. He saw a half-buried sign with holes punched through the letters where light bulbs used to shine. It said “lunch,” and he bought it for $20.
To this day, the sign still works — Voyles occasionally screws in light bulbs and plugs it in just to make sure.
“It’s been lying on the desert floor for I don’t know how many years,” he said. “It was almost a hundred years old then when I bought it.”
While the lunch sign is by far one of the oldest he owns, the availability of the signs is much more important than the aesthetics, he said. Voyles realized the vintage signs were not as heavy or difficult to dismantle as he thought. And so he wanted more. He went out on the road again, salvaging signs from off the side of the road and those still on their original posts, often learning lessons the hard way.
Some of Voyles’ comical stories of near-death experiences while sign collecting include a face-to-face encounter with a scared owl and dropping and rolling on the desert floor after his shirt caught fire from a metal cutter.
Voyles makes signs using a process almost identical to that of 100 years ago. Using solely hand tools and no electric machinery, he cuts the steel frame, the sheet metal can that shapes the frame and the same tube supporters used in the 1920s.
While most people in the sign business come up as tradesmen who work for sign companies and then start their own businesses, Voyles is self-taught.
“I came in from a completely different point of view,” he said. “I came in as an artist, I came at it as a writer, and I came at it as someone who knew how to work with their hands, but really not knowing any of the tricks.”
In recent years, Voyles has shifted from making signs as an art form and a contribution to the community to using it as a way to feed his wife and kids.
“I wasn’t trying to put it in front of businesses,” he said. “My initial position is ‘Hey, this is art, and you should put it on your wall above your couch.’”
Though the signs Voyles creates on a regular basis are for local Austin businesses and advertisements, he puts love and care into his pieces so that in the end, they are public art.
His signs are actual art with words, said his wife Gail Chovan.
“He adds such beauty to urban landscape,” she said.
Much of Voyles’ day is spent meeting with clients, taking measurements or buying supplies. At night, after his twins have gone to bed, Voyles builds most of his signs.
Since the mid ’80s, Voyles has carried a Sheriff’s notebook with him at all times. In his tall, right-slanted handwriting, he fills it with banking notes, field measurements, sketches and to-do lists. It is in these notepads that the signs begin.
Five minutes after drawing up ideas for the sign, Voyles is on site.
“I have to be on site to get a feel for it, because it isn’t just me shutting my eyes and seeing it,” Voyles said. “I have to get a sense of where the traffic is coming from, where the sun’s coming down, what’s the best advantage of appealing to people and what works best with the architecture of the building.”
Often times, the client already has the graphic for they want in the sign. Voyles’ duty is to imagine it, all of which happens in an old grocery store turned studio.
For 17 years, Voyles has designed, welded and cut metal in his studio, which is so choked with junk that there is barely a strip of walkway.
“You’re more likely to break yourself than something,” Voyles said.
As a self-proclaimed hoarder since childhood, Voyles said he has learned to live in his own mess. From a tangle of neon glass to a Mrs. Santa Claus and a vintage Coke sign, Voyles’ studio is like a storage unit for a torn-down Coney Island.
“It’s kind of a primordial ooze of which my things are born,” he said.
The only thing Voyles does not handcraft for his signs are the neon lights. He outsources the job to a man in Lockhart, about 30 miles south of Austin.
“That’s a totally different craft,” he said. “Bending neon tubes is an art and craft, and it’s difficult to get good at it. You have to practice for years before you sell your work. I don’t have years, and I’m not interested in becoming a tube bender.”
On any given day, Voyles said he might touch on five different projects — from driving out an East Texas abandoned movie theater sign to a project for Upper Crust Bakery that he says is on the back burner at the moment. Early Wednesday morning, Voyles climbed on a 12-foot ladder in a pair of muddy cowboy boots onto the ledge of Wahoo’s Fish Taco. This was more of a doctor call, he said.
General manager of Wahoo’s Kelly Vann said he recommended Voyles to his boss to do the signs for the restaurant after seeing a few of Voyles’ signs on display at Austin Speed Shop.
“We wanted an older feel, classic look to fit South Congress,” Vann said.
He said they wanted the ceramic, yellow light bulbs to blink every few seconds, just like the vintage Terminex sign that spurred Voyles’ passion as a child.
“It’s Las Vegas,” Voyles said. “You don’t see it here very much anymore.”

"Five Seconds"...

2011-01-31T09:47:00.000-08:00

...a new video make by writers and filmmakers from UT's Daily Texan:

Five Seconds from The Daily Texan on Vimeo.

Pecha Kucha...

2011-01-26T07:54:00.000-08:00

Evan speaks to the crowd about his inspirations and the driving force behind his work:

PechaKucha Night Vol.08 _ EvanVoyles from PechaKucha Night Austin on Vimeo.

Old Favorites

2010-09-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

They're doin' the E Street shuffle...

2009-06-05T20:36:00.000-07:00

It's only a block and a half down E Street, from the chameleon-green beach cottage to the liqour store.

Which turns out to be closed, so it's across the main drag, past THE PALACE (vaulted, waterfalled) of beach T-shirts, to the IGA grocery store. The parking lot is packed with everyone else who missed the liquor store deadline, plus the sunburned kids just out of school for the summer, and their divorced parents, and their retired grandparents, all seemingly on the make for something. Everyone seems to be in a hurry and yet they all move so slowly, checking each other out. Friday night in a small town on a small island temporarily awash with tourists.

I just want beer, bottled water, bugspray, and a corkscrew. I only walk away with half the list, because the store's shelves have been cleared. Then it's back down E Street to the Sea and Sands Cottages court in my flipflops and torn black jeans.

There's little deja vu for me in this town: the last time I spent here was forty years ago. In a polaroid photo taken on that trip, I'm eleven years old in a yellow cowboy shirt and wraparound sunglasses (both probably from the 1960's version of THE PALACE), eleven miles out to sea near the oil rigs, standing on the rear deck of a fishing boat, holding aloft a silver king mackeral I'd just caught which is half as big as me. Both the fish and I are grinning; all teeth.

The photo doesn't show the rest of my family: my sister, mother, and father. I seem to remember they were below deck, sea sick. But probably my dad was just getting a beer, or took the picture, or both.

Now I'm here with my twins -- son and daughter each about the length of that kingfish, and each grinning at the prospect of the Beach -- and my wife. It's our first family vacation together since we discovered Gail's illness and began the grueling treatment process. She's on a mission, I think, to take our kids to the Jersey shore of her youth, and this is the nearest comparable option. Without missing daily radiation. Or going below deck, sick of the journey and the prospect of the return trip.

The barefoot manager asks me if we plan on doing any fishing while we're here.

I tell him no. We've caught our limit.

And we're happy with our catch, despite everything. Our children shine in the sun, laughing and bouncing like the dolphins we hope to see tomorrow. And we're alive to see them. We have no real plans for this trip other than that.

More later.

Madmen, drummers, bummers...

2009-05-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

Nostalgia.

In an episode of Mad Men, the finale of the first season I think, it is defined, in Greek, as "the wound that won't heal".

And I'm one of those kids that picks at their scabs.

The picking has occurred in several areas of late. For one, I have been studying the television series Mad Men (as opposed to Mad Magazine, another vintage period marker), on assignment from my friends who are opening a bowling alley in an abandoned thrift store. I am to design and build the sign for this project, and hopefully the sign artwork will become the logo as well. The building itself is from 1958, but my friends are addicted to Man Men so they have set the 'backdate' of the project forward to the early 60's --the time frame of the series. We hope to create a setting that looks like we "discovered" the bowling alley intact, buried beneath the thrift store's rubble like a lost Palace. A Palace, I should add, that also featured a diner and bar, a stage and dance floor, multiple projection screens, and (so very un-60's) karaoke rooms.

Mad Men was supposed to infuse my vision, in order to create a period piece. It has done so, but it has also sent me reeling into memories of that time, because 51 years ago yesterday I was born into that time, and that world, of cigarettes and cocktails and saturation and repression. Like the empty thrift store, I was born in 1958, but my memory only recognizes the years afterward. Every night after the twins finally fall asleep, my wife and I slip another disc into the time machine and revisit our distant youth. It is like watching highly stylized home movies, albeit with better actors standing in for our flawed parents and grandparents.

So those are my nights of nostalgia. During the days, after I drop the twins off at preschool, I have been going to work on the existing old neon sign at Nau's Enfield Drug, which has been in business at their Clarksville location in Austin since 1951. I have been repairing the neon there, when needed, since 1996, but now we are actually restoring the sign to its original glory, with new paint in old colors, and new neon tubing. In effect I am also 'colorizing' the sign, because a hailstorm last year stripped the sign of its neon, leaving only the early-1970's paint scheme of brown and tan with faded white lettering. The same storm also chipped away at these earth tones and revealed a few small areas of the old 1950's paint underneath. Which gave us a window onto a past which we could previously no longer see or remember, shining through the mud imposed since. So the new/restored paint will be in the bright blue, leaf green, and pale orange colors of the fountain service inside the drug store, matching those tiny shards revealed on the sign, with original neon colors to match.

This process also sends me hurtling into nostalgia, not just because it is a vintage sign project -- I do quite a few of those each year -- but because I grew up in an adjacent neighbourhood, just a few blocks away from this pharmacy, in the 1950's and 60's, and then my grandmother moved into a nearby apartment in the 1970's and lived there until her death in the mid-80's.

This little corner drug store is therefore home for me, complete with the sensory overload that a visit to home produces: the taste of the vanilla malt, the smell of the old tiny bathrooms, the look of faded displays for forgotten products, the feel of using a rotary phone to make calls (because the twins knocked my cell phone into the toilet one morning), and the sound of ... conversations. I have more conversations with passersby at this pharmacy than at all my other job sites put together. People from my childhood, people from my recent history, people I don't even know. Nobody can resist talking to the man on the ladder, with his ancient truck full of light and a paintbrush stuck into his graying hair. Another mad man at work.

And then the final quick-pick in this nostalgia trifecta was yesterday, and it was an unexpected birthday gift from the cosmos. I was playing guitar with our band, comprised of a group of signmakers. We play after hours, just for fun, upstairs from a sign shop, at the end of the work week. Drums, bass, keyboards, guitar. Playing with a band again is a throwback to my teenage years in the aforementioned neighbourhood. Except that now I have no illusions that I am good at it or will ever be a rock star.

We had been playing for about an hour. The bass player told me to turn up my volume, so I did. The drummer said it was too loud, so I backed off. I try to pay attention to what the drummer says, because he has the best vantage point on our overall sound, and I try to lock into his rhythm and vantage point, and because my son Creed has announced that he is to be a drummer and I am trying to anticipate that relationship between us.

So I squatted in front of the amp to adjust the controls more carefully, and I suddenly felt and heard the beginning of feedback squall coming out of the grill. I was crouched in the jaws of the speaker, where an amp and a guitar begin to have a heated conversation that, initially, does not include the player. Prior to Jimi Hendrix, most players avoided this phenomenon when possible and squelched it when it occurred. Because it sounds like your amp is about to explode. After Hendrix, players avoided it for this same reason, and also to avoid being compared to Hendrix. I have never attempted to control and dance with feedback the way he did. Like an aural acid trip.

But this time, for some reason, I did. As I stood up to get the guitar away from the speaker, and felt the roar diminish, I stopped in mid-crouch and began to try to explore the edge of the distortion field, moving in the periphery of the speaker to adjust the effect. I began to play to it, with it, and heard my playing rise above the rolling noise. And I stayed with it, imagining that this is what it felt like for my middle-aged friends who have taken up surfing in recent years, the first time they caught a wave successfully, and felt the ocean carry them away.

The rest of the band fell in with me, and for the next five or ten minutes we all rode the swell of distortion and howl and whammy bar shimmers and harmonic dissonance. This was why I wanted to play electric guitar in the first place, all those years ago. Not to sound like Jimi, but just to feel that Wow! factor of creating something Big, even if it's an accidental discovery.

Then I unplugged, and went to pick up the kids at school.

Watch this space. It is literally, and figuratively, a work in progress. An attempt to fiddle with the controls and find the Wow and ride. To see what bright shards are revealed in the storm of (cognitive) dissonance.

It all starts here. And goes I know not where. I've threatened this for years: come along if you dare. I'll write about the things I see, or found along the way. Metaphors and ironies, from the past and today.

My wife says it is a prosaic mosaic.

More later.