First published April 24, 2015.
A lion resting beside its cub, made entirely with a typewriter. Look closely and the shading turns out to be built from punctuation marks; the signature at the bottom reads "Typed by".
Paul Smith (1921 to 2007) was an American artist who created detailed pictures of animals, landscapes and famous paintings using nothing but a manual typewriter. He had severe spastic cerebral palsy, which limited control of his hands and face, and he developed his method over more than seven decades. His work looks like pencil or charcoal drawing at first glance; only up close do you see that every line and shadow is made of typed symbols.
Who was Paul Smith?
Smith was born in Philadelphia on 21 September 1921. Cerebral palsy affected him from early childhood and kept him from attending school; everyday tasks and speech were difficult for him. According to his biography, he discovered typing at about the age of eleven, when he found a discarded typewriter in a neighbour's trash and started experimenting with it.
He never married and had no children. In 1967 he moved to the Rose Haven retirement home in Roseburg, Oregon, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He died on 25 June 2007 at the age of 85. The short film below, widely shared online, shows him at work and some of the pictures he produced.
How he made pictures with a typewriter
Smith's method was ingenious. He used only the symbols on the number row of the keyboard: @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _. Because he could not press two keys at once, he locked the shift key down so the number keys would print symbols instead of digits. To steady his movements, he held his right hand with his left while he typed.
Different symbols create different textures. Dense characters such as # and @ build dark areas, while lighter marks like the underscore or the bracket suggest fine lines and soft edges. He controlled the vertical spacing with the roller, positioning the paper precisely so that rows of characters could overlap and build up shading. When he used coloured ribbons, he sometimes pressed his thumb on the ribbon to smudge and blend tones, which gave the finished pictures their soft, drawn look.
The work was slow. He typed for two to three hours a day, often to classical music, and a single picture could take anywhere from two weeks to three months.
Living and working with cerebral palsy
Cerebral palsy is a group of lifelong conditions affecting movement and posture, caused by differences in the developing brain before, during or shortly after birth. It affects roughly two in every thousand children, and the spastic type, which Smith had, accounts for about 80 percent of cases. The underlying brain injury does not worsen, but its effects on muscles and movement vary widely from person to person, as does its impact on learning; many people with cerebral palsy have no intellectual disability at all.
Smith's story is often told as pure inspiration, and his persistence is remarkable. It is also a story about access: an ordinary office machine, adapted with a locked shift key and a careful technique, gave him a way to make art and to communicate. Assistive tools, from adapted keyboards to eye-tracking software, now open similar paths for many people. If you or someone you care for has questions about cerebral palsy, talk to a doctor or a specialist team.
What he created
Over his lifetime Smith produced hundreds of pictures. His subjects included animals, rural landscapes, religious figures and historical scenes, as well as recreations of well-known paintings such as the Mona Lisa and Washington Crossing the Delaware. His work reached a much wider audience after videos about him spread online.
The lion and cub at the top of this page is typical of his animal studies: the mane is built from layers of overlapping marks, the background is lightly textured, and the dark areas rely on repeated dense symbols rather than heavy pressure.
Typewriter art before and after Smith
Smith was not the only person to draw with a typewriter, but he was one of its most dedicated practitioners. Pictures made from typed characters have circulated for well over a century, and in the 20th century the idea moved to teleprinters, line printers and computer terminals. Bell Labs researchers produced early computer-printed character art in 1966, and later the bulletin-board and internet cultures of the 1980s and 1990s turned it into ASCII art. Smith's pictures belong to the same family, made by hand, one key at a time.
How to look at his work
The best way to appreciate a Paul Smith picture is to look at it twice: once from a distance, where it reads as a soft drawing, and once up close, where it dissolves into rows of symbols. Notice how he chose one character for fur and another for shadow, and how blank paper becomes light. Those decisions, repeated thousands of times, are what make the pictures work, and they are a good reason to remember him first as an artist with an unusual and carefully mastered tool.
Sources: Paul Smith (Wikipedia); Cerebral palsy (Wikipedia); Typewriter art (Wikipedia); Idealist Revolution; Video on YouTube.
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