Typewriter Drawings Turn Photos into Distorted Portraits

Artist and printmaker Rachel Mulder uses a manual typewriter to “draw” impressionistic portraits.

by DJ Pangburn

June 26, 2015, 3:55pm

Michelle, 8 x 10 3/8 inches. All images courtesy the artist

If artistic limitation is a form of creative sadomasochism, then Portland-based artist and printmaker Rachel Mulder takes this idea to wondrous extremes. In Unrevealed, a series currently on display at Rush Mor Records in Milwaukee, Wisconsin through June 30, Mulder creates cartoonishly-mutated portraits with nothing more than her trusty Sears Citation II manual typewriter.

Mulder starts with a photograph of the subject as a framework, then takes to her typewriter to create portraits one keystroke at a time. The images form, as Mulder says, like sediment collecting on the page. The portraits range from Dominic, depicting a young man clutching his face looks as though he was assembled inside a computer program, to Jamond, which looks more like an alien organism than a portrait of a head and hand.

“I use my manual typewriter as a cumbersome, yet delicate, drawing tool [and] I really enjoy the necessity to kowtow to the available symbols and linear quality this tool affords,” Mulder tells The Creators Project. “Limiting variables to drawing, or any form of art-making, really, creates an interesting challenge. This process grants me the satisfaction of self-flagellation that I coveted in my background in printmaking.”

Once Mulder lays down a mark, that’s it—it stays. At the same time, she describes the process as fairly forgiving: a manual typewriter allows Mulder to control the hardness of the strike and therefore the value of each mark. Some of these marks include the 1s and 0s of binary code, so there is a bit of interplay between digital and analog technology in some of the Unrevealed drawings.

“I've always been a bit fearful and/or dismissive of technology, and this process is definitely a reaction to that,” Mulder explains. “Not just that I'm using an old-timey device, but it's the nature of the process itself. It seems that many makers are working in a way which opposes the immediacy and overwhelming nature of having ultimate access via technology.”

“We receive and process information so flippantly, because we just can't help it if we are paying any attention to the internet,” she adds. “Drawing with my typewriter forces me to slow down and to treat each mark as something precious and meaningful, a meditative yet self-flagellating exercise in compartmentalizing.”

Each typewriter drawing is made on Rives BFK paper.