The BOGAN NEON art show starts next week

Come and see some great neon art with a Westie twist at the Bogan Neon art show

Accepted here: introducing the bitcoin neon sign

 

The neon bitcoin sign has arrived.
In order to add some pizzazz to the act of spending in bitcoins, a redditor has built a vibrant sign so that merchants can easily let customers know that they accept bitcoin.

 

"You are (on) an island" goes to England

 Funded! This project successfully raised its funding goal on Sep 27, 2012.

152 Backers

$12,397

pledged of $12,000 goal 

 KICKSTARTER

A guerilla public art tour that culminates in an exhibition at Neon Workshops in Wakefield, England.

About the work

You are (on) an island is a large blue neon sign that states quite literally, "You are on an island." The word ‘on’ blinks rhythmically on and off, and for the moments that word remains unilluminated, a new phrase with a different meaning emerges - “You are an island.” by Alicia Eggert & Mike Fleming

 

How Neon Works

Chattanooga restaurant's neon frog sign coming back to life

 

 Barry Snyder, left, and Scott Coffey survey the old Ellis Restaurant's jumping frog sign with plans on restoring it to working order. The unique sign and former restaurant are situated directly across the street from the Chattanooga Choo Choo.

A giant green neon frog may jump again in downtown Chattanooga.
An effort is underway to restore the Ellis Restaurant sign at 1443 Market St. across from the Chattanooga Choo Choo.
In its heyday, the sign blazed in Art Deco glory. A green neon frog -- advertising the restaurant's frog legs -- jumped over such neon-lit menu items as "steaks," "chops" and "spaghetti." The words "Ellis Restaurant" stood out in red neon surrounded by more than 600 white incandescent bulbs.
Like moths drawn to a flame, local diners and out-of-town luminaries -- including heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey and pro football quarterback Joe Namath -- ate at the Ellis Restaurant, which closed in the late 1970s.
"It's a piece of art," building owner Scott Coffey said of the sign. "I'm one of those who believes art shouldn't be in somebody's house. I believe art should be where people can enjoy it."

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American Apparel -Neon window installation

Text Based Neon Art From Bruce Nauman And Six Other Artists

  Text art seems to be popping up everywhere these days in a multitude of diverse forms, although the use of text in art is inarguably not a new movement.  However, when it comes to using words in visual art, several artists of different ages and sub-genres have found ways to burn their words into our brains.  The pieces featured here have real stay-power.  Whether the artist employs a blinking pattern between words, such as Bruce Nauman does, or draws rawly from their cultural background and related personal experience, such as Glenn Ligon and Patrick Martinez, these works deliver a very contemporary message. With simple language, and a sometimes poetic-sometimes brash- sense of honesty, these neon text-based works transcend many other works of text based art made today.  Artists featured here include: Bruce Nauman, Patrick Martinez, Tracey Emin, Jill Magid, Glenn Ligon, Robert Montgomery and Jung Lee.  The works speak for themselves- yet we encourage you to read between the lines.
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Palm Desert council to vote on neon sign ordinance

A neon sign maker shows his skills at his Cathedral City business. Palm Desert City Council is set this week to vote on whether to allow neon signs in business windows, something it was poised to do a month ago before members asked for feedback from El Paseo merchants, who would still be barred from using them.

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Meet the artists behind the new Rainier ‘R’

Zeek "Built" Warzecha smiles as he looks out at the "R" sign, reflected in his sunglasses, during the first Rainier Beer "R Crawl" stop at 9 LB Hammer in Georgetown. Before the sign returns Thursday to the top of the old brewery, the signature neon is touring the city on a flatbed trailer this afternoon.

 For Western Neon, the company that manufactured the new “R” that will sit atop the old Rainier brewery, iconic Seattle signage is a familiar task. The company will raise the giant letter in a big party on Oct. 24.


As Seattleites watch the new 12-foot Rainier Brewing “R” being hoisted atop the old brewery along Interstate 5 later this week, some onlookers will be holding their breath.
“When you go to plug it in, you just hope that it works,” said Andre Lucero, president of Western Neon, which fabricated the new “R.” “During travel, while the crane is picking it up, anything could break. And then you have this major countdown, and it doesn’t light ... ”
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Tracey Emin Neon Sculptures Up for Auction to Benefit the Museum of Contemporary Art

 Tracey Emin sure must love Miami.
It's not just that this city is lit with neon, one of the British artist's favorite mediums. Or that Emin selected Miami as the home of her first works in the collection of an American Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art purchased Emin's video Why I Never Became a Dancer in 1998. It's not just that that same museum will host the artist's first solo show in a U.S. museum during Art Basel this year, either.
Emin and MOCA clearly have a long-standing relationship, and Emin's proving it's anything but one-sided. Today, MOCA announced that Emin has donated five of her neon works to be auctioned off to benefit the museum.
The series of five sculptures, each one a glowing, 3-D version of the word "Loving" scrawled in Emin's own handwriting, will go up for auction by New York City auction house Philips on Nov. 6. There'll be a live auction right on Park Avenue that evening (how very ritzy), but interested Miami buyers can place bids via email or phone.
Not that you're going to win an original Emin, you shlub. In 2007, her work was valued between $24,000 and $700,000, and Emin's fame has only increased since then.
The auction is still good news for Miami art lovers, however; those prices mean more funding for MOCA, which has a track record of supporting fledgling artists (like Emin was in 1998) into prominent art careers. As MOCA chairman Dr. Kira Flanzraich explains in a release, "Tracey's remarkable generosity is indicative of the close ties that MOCA engenders with its artists, many of whom have received their first significant exposure in the United States with exhibitions at the museum."

Neon lighting used in new NAB building in Docklands

Neon lights from Delta Neon have been used in the lighting design of the new NAB building in Docklands, Melbourne.
Designed by Woods Bagot, the entire building is based on triangular themes even down to the clusters of decorative lighting.
NDYLight were the principal lighting consultants on the project and specified two kilometres of cold cathode lighting.
Logistically, it would be very hard to maintain the lighting for the building, however with cold cathode lighting many hours of changing lights have been saved, with maintenance and cost of the lights both reduced.
Lux levels of the cold cathode put out more lumens per watt than LEDs, so to achieve the current lux level of the building would require more energy and colour rendering.
Custom made white triphosphor tubing was used throughout, with the feature lighting having a lifespan which exceeds 200,000 hours.
NAB wanted to move its operations to a new Docklands site where they wanted to use products which exceeded quality expectations without sacrificing on sustainability.
Neon lights were used as NAB wanted to achieve a 7 Star energy rating for the building.

Chief to shine again: Neon sign effort continues in Old Town Pocatello

POCATELLO — Memories of movies seen for the first time in Pocatello’s Chief Theater came flooding back to folks gathered for Friday’s official groundbreaking ceremony for restoration of the theater’s iconic neon sign on the 200 block of North Main.
 Dixon said there are more than 20 neon signs in the downtown area of the Gate City, and nine of them will be lit when the annual Light Up the Night Parade is held Nov. 29. Among those will be the massive Scott’s Ski and Sports sign on the front of the historic Peterson Building across North Main from the Chief sign.

    Old Town Pocatello director Stephanie Palagi said there will be a grand opening for a new Purple Moon Gallery and Auction House that is being established by Sam Neutuschil in the Peterson Building on Nov. 29 to coincide with the Chief sign relighting.
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Behind the studio door with James St. Germaine

 

 

James St. Germaine makes art with a rare earth element, a colorless, odorless gas that is produced in the solar system by a fusion process of stars!

And, indeed, this artist gets stars in his eyes when he talks about his passion for “painting with light,” where he incorporates the monatomic gas neon into his paintings and sculptures.

The West Wareham artist was washing up at a sink one day and accidentally splashed water onto a mirror above the sink, when a beam of sunlight illuminated the water dripping down the mirror. He describes being so excited by this effect that he wanted to capture it on canvas with paint.

Paint alone didn’t satisfy, so he experimented with electric light shining through his paintings from behind the canvass, which gave him some satisfaction.

But one lucky day at a flea market, St. Germaine saw an old neon sign and, as he describes it, “a light bulb went on and now I’m crazy for neon, trying to find it everywhere.”

Each of the old signs is a length of glass tubing filled with neon gas and bent and twisted into a kind of cursive script that may, for example, say ice, open or camel. Often the words themselves are the inspiration for a new work of art.

The artist also collects quantities of discarded wood and metal that will be incorporated into his work. A bowling ball he found rolling down the road now tops a yard sculpture

St. Germaine’s studio is a trim little building about the size of a one-car garage behind his house. There’s no mistaking its purpose. There are giant painted wood letters over the door shouting “Jim’s Studio.” The front wall of the little building is covered with giant images of camels. A visitor is instantly intrigued by the energy and scale of the outer decoration and is eager to see what is inside.

The studio door opens to a lively space full of tall sculptures and paintings, a room so full of paint, shapes, letters and words that it seems like a party crowded with interesting people having conversations. Jim introduces the pieces with an almost breathless excitement, giving details of the inspiration, materials and evolution of each one.

“Have you seen this one lit up?” he asks as he begins to plug in the cords and transformers that  hang all over the studio. On one wall is a humorous self-portrait that is lit from behind by blinking lights that outline his face. On another is an abstract painting with the illuminated word “priceless” running down the side. Attached to this painting is a shelf with three objects – each one is something handmade by his three granddaughters. Jim handles the small objects with care and says with a catch in his voice, “priceless!”

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Wattage Industry There’s more to urban lighting than illumination

 Decades before Hillary Clinton chaired a health care task force and Nancy Reagan urged new drug enforcement laws, Lady Bird Johnson declared war on neon lights. Specifically, she fought for the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, lamenting what she called “endless corridors walled in by neon, junk, and ruined landscape.”

Today, neon signs may not seem like a first-lady-worthy scourge. After all, every city-dwelling North American can probably think of a beloved neon landmark, from Boston’s CITGO sign (which was replaced by LED lights in 2005) to the smiling pink pachyderm advertising Seattle’s Elephant Car Wash. At the time, though, Lady Bird Johnson was not alone in her views: Even before their exuberant heyday in the 1920s and ’30s came to an end, neon lights had become, for some, “emblematic of the decline of Western civilization,” observes Christoph Ribbat. 

Ribbat is a professor of American studies at Germany’s University of Paderborn, and his writing is larded with irrelevant detail—“A long-term study shows that 75 per cent of successful country songs between 1960 and 1987 were love songs”—and sometimes baffling. On the other hand, he’s done a prodigious amount of research. Flickering Light details the history of neon as a medium for advertising and art, beginning with the British chemist William Ramsay’s discovery of the noble gas in 1898. Twelve years later, a French engineer, Georges Claude, demonstrated the first neon lights, made with electrified glass tubes. Read more...

Bronze Boot auction

 Bidders head for the indoor items at Tuesday's Bronze Boot auction sale in north Grand Forks. The large neon sign atop the restaurant was sold to Wade Pearson of Home of Economy and will be on display inside the store. Read more....

See the neon sign go up at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Kalamazoo, theater to open in mid-November

A crew from Signart installed the new neon sign for Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in downtown Kalamazoo Friday morning. The new restaurant-style movie theater will be open in November. Read more...

An artist’s rendering of clichés, by South Korean Jung Lee

“I dream of you”; “I still remember you”; “How could you do this to me.” These are words we hear all the time. And we hardly ever stop to think about what they really mean. But South Korean artist Jung Lee has spent a lot of time trying to understand the connotations of these common clichés and delving deep into the emotions behind these words.

In her photographic works, she combines neon sculptures of everyday phrases with various outdoor environments to create haunting landscapes that invite viewers to contemplate on human relationships and the sense of isolation that is part of modern urban life.Read more...

The End Of Steaks, Cows And A Giant Neon Cactus On Route 1

 This week, the owners of Hilltop Steak House called it quits, announcing a closure date of Oct. 20. The Hilltop has been a steak-lover's destination for 52 years, and it's the latest in a string of closings of great Boston-area restaurants.Read more...

Duane Linklater of Ontario wins $50K Sobey Art Award

 

 Multidiscipline artist Duane Linklater, who creates thought-provoking work exploring First Nations identity in the context of contemporary society, is the latest winner of the $50,000 Sobey Art Award, one of Canada's most prestigious visual arts honours. Read more ...

"ALL LIT UP!" - New Art by Gigi Horr Liverant & Mundy Hepburn

  OLD LYME, CONNECTICUT - "Fiery!", "Electric!", "Hypnotic!" are only some of the anticipated exclamations at this upcoming Cooley Gallery exhibition. Two Connecticut natives will be featured in All Lit Up!, pastel artist Gigi Horr Liverant and neon artist Mundy Hepburn.

"This colorful and energetic exhibition is a perfect parallel to the season when the ordinary in nature transforms into the sublime. The electric colors in All Lit Up! are a siren call to a visual feast, enjoy and indulge before the season goes away!” says gallery owner Jeff Cooley.

Alongside, above and below Gigi's paintings are Mundy's neon sculptures: fantastic creations of lampworked glass so seductive you almost pity their poor "OPEN" sign neon cousins. They vibrate and prance as if echoing the playful and curious mind of their creator.  Mundy's been described as a pioneer of neon art successfully combining elements to create movement and colors previously unappreciated.

"Everyone wants to be near Mundy's creations. People seem confounded by Mundy's work, startled by his open invitation to imagine and play through his fantastic visions in neon," observes the gallerist.

Mundy is an unabashedly self-taught artist who has had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions and lives and creates in Old Saybrook.

Mind your Q’s and U’s in the home of ‘Breaking Bad’ and Route 66

 Historic Route 66: Reserve a few hours to take a self-guided cruise along Old Route 66 — now Central Avenue. You’ll pass the historic KiMo Theatre in downtown Albuquerque, the University of New Mexico campus, countless diners and dives, and the eclectic boutiques of the Nob Hill Historic District. The highlight, though, is the collection of neon signs, many of them vintage, that get to buzzing around dusk.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/04/4524958/mind-your-qs-and-us-in-the-home.html#storylink=cpy

Stateside Theatre neon sign to blaze brightly tonight

 The Stateside Theatre neon blade sign in downtown Austin will shine brightly again beginning Wednesday night. The 1935 sign had gone dark until the “Ready, Set, Glow” fundraising campaign, along with a grant from the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau, raised $62,000 to repair it.

 The sign restoration, which began in August, was handled by Todd Sanders of Austin's Roadhouse Relics.