So many of the artists living and working in Turners Falls have deep ties to Western Massachusetts. Although she was born in Michigan, Jess Marsh Wissemann found not only her passion for creating hand painted signs here but says she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
Her company, Hired Hand Signs, is bringing back the personalized touch of hand-made signs and gold leaf lettering to businesses across the Pioneer Valley. And you may also recognize her work creating one of the area’s biggest tourist attractions at Mike’s Maze in Sunderland.
Connecting Point’s Ross Lippman brings us to her studio on 3rd Avenue to see how her hand-crafted signs are created.
This segment originally aired on March 31, 2022.
Read the transcript:
Zydalis Bauer, Connecting Point: Many of the artists living and working in Turners Falls have deep ties to western Massachusetts. Although she was born in Michigan, Jess Marsh Wissemann not only found her passion for creating hand-painted signs here but says she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
Her company, Hired Hand Signs, is bringing back the personalized touch of handmade signs and gold leaf lettering to businesses across the Pioneer Valley. And you may also recognize her work in creating one of the area’s biggest tourist attractions at Mike’s Maze in Sunderland.
Connecting Point’s Ross Lippmann brings us to her studio on Third Avenue to see how her handcrafted signs are made.
Jess Marsh Wissemann, Hired Hand Signs: My name is Jess Marsh Weissmann. I’m a sign painter based in Turners Falls, Massachusetts.
People definitely pause when I say I’m a sign painter. Alternatively, I sometimes say I’m an artist who paints signs, and for a lot of people, that makes more sense. Because as a trade, sign painting has mostly died at this point. It’s mostly faded away.
My interest in learning about gold leaf signage, basically, it is the pinnacle of the sign painting world. Like it’s the — it’s the practice that I think all sign painters kind of, you know, work toward perfecting because it is really difficult.
Right here in town, we have the Five Eyed Fox restaurant, I gilded their windows. Loot on Avenue A, I did their logo in gold leaf and painted their raccoon character on the door.
I feel really lucky that I found this interest and decided to pursue it, because Western Massachusetts is really the perfect area to be a sign painter, I think. There’s sort of an aversion to things that are mass produced. People are really interested in making things here. There’s a lot of artists here, and so this is the perfect place to make artist made signs.
My family farm is Warner Farm in Sunderland and we are mostly known as the home of Mike’s Maze. And I happened to inherit the job of designing Mike’s Maze for our family farm.
And so in 2015, I made my first corn maze. And we posted the picture of it one evening and the next day we woke up and found out it was on the front page of Reddit and it had gone viral and I got kind of hooked on it! You know, it was really exciting that so many people responded to my artwork that was carved into a cornfield.
For the 2020 election, that fall, it was pretty obvious to me that we needed to do something about the election, about voting. We focused on voting and voting rights and the history of voting.
It’s been…the real creative spark for me. I think it’s what ultimately led me to pursuing art as my full-time work.
Mural painting and sign painting are very similar. There are a lot of similar techniques that you need to know how to do. I just am so interested in having a blank slate and figuring out how to bring life to it with art. And so, murals or signs, either — either or, they’re both really fun for me to work on.
