'The Lost Art' of Neon Signs

Hey there,

As promised in our Behind the Blog Friday, here is our first short documentary. We made this because we thought Geo is a cool person, but also as an experiment to see if we have the ability and bandwidth to make short documentaries in the field. We started with something relatively low stakes but hope to make more of these in the future about all the things we cover. Let us know what you think!

-Jason

Next to technicolor neon signs featuring Road Runner, an inspirational phrase that says “everything will be fucking amazing,” and a weed leaf, Geovany Alvarado points to a neon sign he’s particularly proud of: “The Lost and Found Art,” it says.

“I had a customer who called me, it was an old guy. He wanted to meet with someone who actually fabricates the neon and he couldn’t find anyone who physically does it,” Alvarado said. “He told me ‘You’re still doing the lost art.’ It came to my head that neon has been dying, there’s less and less people who have been learning. So I made this piece.” 

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For 37 years, Alvarado has been practicing “the lost and found art” of neon sign bending, weathering the general ups and downs of business as well as, most threateningly, the rise of cheap LED signs that mimic neon and have become popular over the last few years. 

“When neon crashed and LED and the big letters like McDonald’s, all these big signs—they took neon before. Now it’s LED,” he said. In the last few years, though, he said there has been a resurgent interest in neon from artists and people who are rejecting the cheap feel of LED. “It came back more like, artistic, for art. So I’ve been doing 100 percent neon since then.” 

At his shop, Quality Neon Signs in Mid-City Los Angeles, there are signs in all sorts of states of completion and functionality strewn about Alvarado’s shop: old, mass-produced beer advertisements whose transformers have blown and are waiting for him to repair them, signs in the shapes of soccer and baseball jerseys, signs with inspirational phrases (“Everything is going to be fucking amazing,” “NEED MONEY FOR FAKE ART”), signs for restaurants, demonstration tubes that show the different colors he offers, weed shop signs, projects he made when he was bored. There are projects that are particularly meaningful to him: a silhouette he made of his wife holding their infant daughter, and a sign of the Los Angeles skyline with a wildfire burning in the background, “just to represent Los Angeles,” he said. There are old little bits of tube that have broken off of other pieces. “We save everything,” Alvarado said, “in case we want to fix it or need it for a repair.” His workshop, a few minutes away, features a “Home Sweet Home” sign,” a sign he made years ago for Twitter/Chanel collaboration featuring the old Twitter bird logo, and a sign for the defunct Channing Tatum buddy cop show Comrade Detective. 

The overwhelming majority of signs Alvarado sells are traditional neon glass. The real thing. But he does offer newer LED faux-neon signs to clients who want it, though he doesn’t make those in-house. Alvarado says he sells LED to keep up with the times and because they can be more practical for one-off events because they are less likely to break in transit, but it’s clear that he and the overwhelming majority of neon sign makers think the LED stuff is simply not the same. Most LED signs look cheaper and do not emit the same warmth of light, but are more energy efficient.

I asked two neon sign creators about the difference while I was shopping for signs. They said they think the environmental debate isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems because a lot of the LED signs they make seem to be for one-off events, meaning many LED signs are manufactured essentially for a single use and then turned into e-waste. Many real neon signs are bought as either artwork or are bought by businesses who are interested in the real aesthetic. And because they are generally more expensive and are handmade, they are used for years and can be repaired indefinitely.

I asked Alvarado to show me the process and make a neon sign for 404 Media, which I’ve wanted for years. It’s a visceral, loud, scientific process, with gas-powered burners that sound like jet engines heating up the glass tubes to roughly 1,000 degrees so they can be bent into the desired shapes. When he first started bending neon, Alvarado says he used to use an overheard projector and a transparency to project a schematic onto the wall. These days, he mocks up designs on a computer aided design program and prints them out on a huge printer that uses a sharpie to draw the schematic. He then painstakingly marks out his planned glass bends on the paper, lining up the tubes with the mockup as he works.

“You burn yourself a lot, your hands get burnt. You’re dealing with fire all the time,” Alvarado said. He burned himself several times while working on my piece. “For me it’s normal. Even if you’re a pro, you still burn yourself.” Every now and then, even for someone who has been doing this for decades, the glass tubes shatter: “You just gotta get another stick and do it again,” he said. 

After bending the glass and connecting the electrodes to one end of the piece, he connects the tubes to a high-powered vacuum that sucks the air out of them. The color of the light in Alvarado’s work is determined by a powdered coating within the tubes or a different colored coating of the tubes themselves; the type of gas and electrical current also changes the type and intensity of the colors. He uses neon for bright oranges and reds, and argon for cooler hues. 

Alvarado, of course, isn’t the only one still practicing the “lost art” of neon bending, but he’s one of just a few commercial businesses in Los Angeles still manufacturing and repairing neon signs for largely commercial customers. Another, called Signmakers, has made several large neon signs that have become iconic for people who live in Los Angeles. The artist Lili Lakich has maintained a well-known studio in Los Angeles’ Arts District for years and has taught “The Neon Workshop” to new students since 1982, and the Museum of Neon Art is in Glendale, just a few miles away. 

A few days after he made my neon sign, I was wandering around Los Angeles and came across an art gallery displaying Tory DiPietro’s neon work, which is largely fine art and pieces where neon is incorporated to other artworks; a neon “FRAGILE” superimposed on a globe, for example. Both DiPietro and Alvarado told me that there are still a handful of people practicing the lost art, and that in recent years there’s been a bit of a resurgent interest in neon, though it’s not that easy to learn.

On the day I picked up my sign, there were two bright green “Meme House” signs for a memecoin investor house in Los Angeles that Alvarado said he had bent and made immediately after working on the 404 Media sign. “I was there working til about 11 p.m.” he said.