Milwaukee artist, graphic designer and “letterism”-practitioner Carl M. Ruppert turns words into portraits of Vince Lombardi, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Jesus, Bob Uecker, Regis Philbin and other inimitable personalities. He uses a word or phrase, often the person’s surname, over and over, with fat letters and spindly, in inverse and in a curving rubber-tire font, to create shade and form.
Like his subjects, Ruppert has a way of re-appearing in the news. He came up in graphic design in Milwaukee (after getting a night-school art education at MATC) through design firms and ad agencies here. He was art director at a bunch of them, first holding the position at Al Herr Advertising at age 22. He tells a lot of stories from those days – before the big New York agencies started wine-ing, dining and picking off the big Milwaukee employers that kept agencies like Al Herr in business. As a young designer, he showed Frank Lloyd Wright around town during one of his visits. (“What an interesting guy,” he told a news reporter.) And in 1991, his conceptual rendering of what a new stadium for the Brewers might look like made the rounds on TV and was a rough draft, in a way, of today’s Miller Park. (Ruppert also did some modeling as a young man, including for Harley-Davidson.)
He claims a close connection with paper and the physical act of drawing. “It’s a real thing that goes from your brain to your hand and back to your brain again,” he says, which is why he still prefers to work in the old way with a drafting board and media. His letterism is a way of capitalizing on the easy precision of an experienced illustrator’s hand. He drew his first letterism portrait in the mid-1990s, after a lunch with a bunch of up-and-coming designers. “I was going to show this young guy how you could use a word to make a picture better than you could on a computer,” he says. “These kids had great talent, but they had never really learned how to draw.”
Ruppert isn’t sure if he should take credit for inventing letterism, but he may be its leading creator. His portraits (and other works) are on display at the Safe House in Milwaukee, and late last year, the uber-exclusive Carlton Club in London hung up a Ruppert letterism-rendering of Winston Churchill. It’s near the door – Many of the most powerful members of the U.K.’s Conservative Party see it before heading home.
