SIGNED99/02

Celebrate Yourself with Confidence

• For the confident and the bold, Steve Porter's SIGNED99 project celebrates choice and individualism, fusing the culture of branding and logo with something uniquely personal: your name.

The Process

• There is a facility to upload an image of your signature above, here. Or at the checkout stage. Alternatively, it can be emailed over later.  

• The image of your unique signature is then projected by Steve onto a blank canvas and painted twice, creating a dramatic interplay between shape and line, essential to the aesthetic balance of the composition.

• Commissions take around 30 - 90 days. Steve will provide updates throughout the process and clients can contact Steve at any time to discuss their commission and its progress.

• Along with the magnificent SIGNED99 branding and your unique number, /02, your artwork will also be signed and dated by Steve on the canvas edges, bottom/top.

• Your SIGNED99 artwork will then couriered to you free, with all the relevant insurances, a Certificate of Authenticity to prove provenance, and a bottle of gorgeous Champagne to enjoy.

The Principles

• Every unique SIGNED99 artwork commission is undertaken by Steve with the same equally high level of care and dedication.

• All work is made using top quality materials which are ethically and sustainably sourced wherever possible.

• Your information is always handled by Steve with absolute discretion. Your privacy is essential.

SOME ARTISTIC SMALL PRINT...

Signatures as Portraits

• Like traditional portraiture, your signature image is a kind of collaboration with the artist, taking the familiar character and shape of your written name and turning into something completely spectacular.

• The edges of the canvas surface reveal the colours that once predominated before the glorious snowstorm of white arrived. The idea of concealing layers of coloured paint is about our private selves, or even our subconscious selves. The colours are our privacy, our memories, our relationships.

• Our names accompany us through our experiences, chosen for us. In this way SIGNED99 is an (almost) ageless portrait, a mirror of ourselves taking those all-important and life-changing decisions.

Technology and Perspective

• A specially designed hand-built optical projector is employed by Steve to perfectly recreate your signature. The use of optics in art is a tradition going back hundreds of years. 

• SIGNED99 comments upon the changing way in which our identities are stored, proved and communicated with signatures presented in juxtaposition to the roll-out of modern biometric data.

• Visually, the varied lines of your signature play a perspective game with the rectangle that holds it, the surrounding layers becoming denser, the closer to the lines they become.

• The double signature reversed creates a negative space between the two, giving the picture balance and harmony, however weighted and shaped your written name is.

Context and Statement

• SIGNED99 (like much of Steve’s current work) involves taking an everyday visual and then placing it within its own space and set of ideas. Here, your signature is super-sized and imbued with an ultra-minimalistic power.

• Like the conceptual pioneers of the early 20th Century, with their “ready-mades”. Here, your signature is the ready-made. And art is whatever the artist (and the viewer) chooses it to be.

• In a sense we (along with everyone else) recreate the artwork ourselves whenever we write our name, thereby making the work universally inclusive as well as remaining intensely personal.

 Physicality and Time

• The deep textures within the white-topped layers surrounding your signature capture the light in different ways, so the surface varies through differing lighting conditions.

• In this way, what appears at first to be an expanse of plain white is forever changing, adding time and movement to a picture which is essentially fixed.

• Most of our signatures are more-or-less set by the time we reach adulthood, meaning that your SIGNED99 portrait captures and displays that chronology. 

Simplicity and Truth

• Simplification is (whether by default or design) a strategy that exists at the foundation of all art, transforming the real or imagined into a picture or object. 

• Via SIGNED99, the traditional portrait is reduced to a series of straights and curves and dots. Through these simple pure marks (of yours) the wonderful truth your character is communicated...