Event: Beautiful Angle
We will have there artwork on display thru the month of October.
Founded in October of 2002, Beautiful Angle is a letterpress printing and street art project in Tacoma, Washington. Approximately once a month, writer Tom Llewellyn and graphic designer Lance Kagey write, design, carve, layout and print a limited run of posters. More than 100 poster designs have been created so far through this time-intensive, manual process, using hand-set wood and lead type, vintage and hand-carved images and occasionally more experimental materials. Each ink color on a poster requires another level of this from-scratch process, plus 24 hours of drying time between runs. Approximately 120 editions of a poster are printed, the majority of which are then distributed in the dark of night around Tacoma’s Proctor, Sixth Avenue and Downtown neighborhoods on telephone poles and on the sides of buildings, using wheat paste and staples. The distribution process is only mildly illegal. What you are looking at, in this gallery, are the lovely leftovers.
Lance Kagey is cofounder of Beautiful Angle and is an artist, organizer, award-winning graphic designer, letterpress printer and stirrer of the pot. Aside from his full-time day job as art director, he regularly teaches design professionals about typography, is co-director of First Night Tacoma and is executive producer of Rotator Magazine. Beautiful Angle is printed in Lance’s basement studio, a crowded concrete bunker crammed with type cases, ancient cast iron equipment, pallets of paper, and pots of ink, with walls papered in local ephemera and floors covered in knock-off Persian rugs. Lance does the lion’s share of Beautiful Angle poster design, but occasionally lends his words as well.
Tom Llewellyn is cofounder of Beautiful Angle and is an author, award-winning copywriter, creative director and insomniac. He writes at work, at home, on the bus in-between, and he writes in the middle of the night. His first book, The Tilting House, was published in 2010 by Random House and quickly sold out the first printing. Tom and his family live three houses away from Lance, so it’s a short walk to Lance’s basement and a short walk back to Tom’s wood shop, where he stores posters, cuts wood for printing plates and occasionally hacks off an extremity. Tom does the lion’s share of Beautiful Angle’s writing, but occasionally lends his pictures as well.
Beautiful Angle is also honored to have the occasional participation of guest artists and writers. In order to participate, “artists must be of a genius nature and must have an active Tacoma address.” These artists include, but are not limited to, Art Chantry, James Stowe, Scott Bailey, Tim Isaacson, Jay Hember, Mike Martin, Jeremy Gregory, Epiphany Couch, Evan Purcell, Ryan Meline, Ben Llewellyn, Jewel Lugo, Alan Boothe, Jeremy Hoog, Bill Kupinse, Emily Kagey, Nicki Vance, Daniel Cairns, Abel Llewellyn, Chris Sharp, Allen Braden, Tyler Kalberg, and Jason Grube.
