Pub sign artist Andrew Grundon talks about his work and the impact of AI. Andrew is based in Cornwall. Video provided by the South West News Agency and posted by Andrew Townsend of Voice Newspapers.
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00:00My name's Andrew Grundon, my business is called Signature Signs. I've been painting signs
00:08since 1998 and prior to that I had a career as an artist. I started to go to a college
00:15called Tresham College in Kettering in Northamptonshire where I lived at the time. When I left there
00:20one of the lecturers asked me what I was going to do when I moved down to Cornwall and I
00:23said I'm going to start painting pictures for a living. And he said it'll never work.
00:27I said what do you mean it'll never work? He said you're useless. He said you haven't
00:32got the right kind of ethic for it. He said you're about as much use as a twiglet with
00:36all the marmite sucked off. And that has stuck in my mind ever since. A delightful thing
00:40for a lecturer to say to a student as they're leaving their care and going out into the
00:43world. A friend of mine told me about the sign writer at Sarstall Brewery who was retiring
00:48so I should go for the job and I did. I got the job on the strength of the fact that I
00:51could paint good pictorial signs for them. So I came out from their employment but I
00:56brought the contract with me when I came. I've gradually been building the client base
01:00since then, making use of the dreaded internet to advertise myself. One thing led to another
01:06and now I work for international PR companies, sometimes television companies, all sorts
01:13of different organisations, film stars, royal households. So there's quite a nice variety
01:19of stuff and I still do brewery stuff as well. I still paint pub signs just for pubs. The
01:24one with the farrier working on the horse, that's to go on the old smithy at Ivy Bridge
01:28which is a very old and a very small pub and I've painted the signs for there many times
01:32over the years since 1998. And each time I repaint a sign for a pub, paint it afresh,
01:39I go back and I look at it again and I get different source material, try and get it
01:46more detailed, try and do it better than I did before and sort of take it up a notch.
01:51From the 1970s onwards, everything got very formulaic and very computerised, very precise,
01:57very clean, very crisp and completely lost its soul. And it didn't have that handmade
02:03feeling of authenticity or integrity about it of when you've actually got somebody who's
02:08learned how to pull a perfect letter S or to paint a good pictorial sign. In recent
02:14years, even pre-Covid, people had started to come back around to thinking, you know
02:19what, I'm kind of tired of all of this formulaic plastic stuff. There's been a groundswell
02:26of people looking for more integrity, not just in signs but I think in everything, in
02:30handmade pottery, in hand-painted pictures, in all these things. People have realised
02:35that they're missing something when everything is created by a computer. There's an intangible
02:42spirit and a soul that is kind of imbued into something that is created from the heart of
02:48an artist or a creative person or a craftsman. The biggest crime that AI has committed is,
02:54for me personally, it has stolen my ability to wonder. Whereas I used to look at those
03:01things and think, that's incredible, that photographer was really fortunate to capture
03:04that moment or that artist must be so talented to make that thing happen. Now the first thing
03:09that happens is I look at it and I think, is it real? Is that an actual thing or is
03:15it AI? Then it's stolen something a lot more important than just the financial remuneration
03:21for the artist. It's taken away your ability to wonder and that is a crime.