My name is Tom Mazzullo, and my work in WordPlay is the Type Improvisations series of drawings.
The first thing I'd like you to know is that, usually, all my work is observational. I believe working this way makes each drawing a unique record of the thoughts and feelings experienced while spending time with the subject. With that said, the works I've submitted to WordPlay only just start with a real object, but take off in a tangent of interpretation and improvisation.
I worked for years with letterforms, creating impossible words by grouping letters visually, and later creating architectural structures with groups of letters seen as forms. Each of these works started with real physical objects – metal or plaster sign letters that could be arranged as still-lifes. For the series of Improvisations featured in WordPlay, I used large antique type-high printing blocks, each a few inches in length and drawn life size. I drew what I had, which were one or two letters from a few fonts, but there were not enough samples to repeat the kind of work I had been doing with groups of sign letters.
So I began imagining what the other letterforms in each font would look like, using the same design aesthetic to "flesh out" the font. I tried to design a consistent font from one sample, and to do it in mirror image, in perspective. The result is a kind of logical nonsense, that almost looks like a word. My favorite drawing in the series is the Type Improvisation on f, which has the most elegant design elements: gently rounded serifs, elegant shoulders, and thin, tapering curves. And if you don't think too hard, the "word" looks like "fight" spelled phonetically, although it says nothing at all.
Lastly, these drawings are done in silverpoint – a medieval drawing medium rarely practiced by artists today. Silverpoint, or metalpoint more generally, can be done with any soft metal; silver, gold, and copper are commonly used in metalpoint, and exotic metals like platinum and bismuth can also be used. Metals are too hard to mark on plain soft paper, so a prepared surface, such as paper or board coated with chalky paint, must be used. The technique allows the artist to create subtle tones with very fine lines of pale-gray color which, unlike pencil, can't be easily corrected. The metals used in silverpoint also tarnish; a drawing in silver left open to the air will change after a few weeks and the dull gray lines will take on a warm, sepia hue. These drawings also have thin strokes of white paint added for highlight, in a technique called Chiaroscuro, which is Italian for light and dark.