Painter of Names, Keeper of Lines
On an Oakland morning in late August, the kind where the air is warm but the trucks still idle, Tony Frisell is waiting. A delivery is supposed to arrive, sometime between ten and “whenever,” he says. He rolls the window of his pickup down, then up again when the trains screech by. In the bed, tools are lashed down tight enough not to rattle. There are paint drips from yesterday’s job, evidence of someone who works with his hands every day, someone who makes other people’s names pop.
Frisell has been drawing letters since before he could spell them. Graffiti, sketchbooks, doodles on scrap paper—he calls his career a “slow lightbulb.” The realization wasn’t a thunderclap, just a gradual clarity: this is what I’ve been doing forever, and maybe it was achievable all along. One day a coffee shop owner asked if he wanted to paint the windows. “I was like, oh shit… okay, yep, totally, I can do it.” He laughs at how unceremonious it was: no grand plan, just a dive.
That’s the thing about Frisell—he resists pressure, but he keeps moving. His Oakland shop, Spelled Out Signs, grew not out of a five-year plan but a pandemic. In 2020, stuck at home, he started painting more and more. Friends asked for birthday signs, a landlord asked for a storefront, and then the requests multiplied. Suddenly, there was a business. A courthouse trip to file paperwork, an LLC card at the hardware store. “Today felt like a business owner,” he remembers, grinning. “That moment of: I’m a real business.”
The work is part craft, part meditation. A five-foot hanging sign takes over his life for a week or two, then it’s gone into the world. The rhythm is strange, always shifting—small jobs stacking up into something sustainable, a big job offsetting a week that didn’t pay. “Sometimes you resent the clients who undervalue the work, sometimes I’m elated they even want this kind of work anymore,” he admits. “You have to let go, and the universe sends you an email and you’re back in.”
Hand-painted signs are, on paper, unnecessary in an age of vinyl and digital printing. But to Frisell, their imperfection is the point. The brush line that wavers slightly, the clean curve that isn’t machine-perfect—that’s where the life is. “They want my hand,” he says. “Not perfect. Imperfectly wonderful.” The resurgence of tattoo shops, vintage stores, murals—it’s all evidence that people still crave the touch of craft. In Oakland and the Bay Area, he stands tall in a tradition of apprentices and tradespeople.
He talks about his influences like old friends: Pierre Tardif, Ralph Gregory, Margaret Kilgallen. He remembers reading Gregory on the train to work, over and over. Practicing letterforms until they were muscle memory. Learning that the architecture of a hand-painted letter is both necessary and beautiful.
His path has always been nonlinear. After graduating from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 2005, he spent years working in production and sign shops and art shows across the city—1305 Gallery, Publico, the echo of the Beautiful Losers exhibit hanging over everything. When a circle of friends decamped west, he followed, truck packed, no savings, no illusions. Oakland felt like home the moment he arrived.
Now, home is east Oakland, a girlfriend, stepkids, and a dog. The shop is ten minutes away, though he dreams of a garage attached to his house where he could just “slap on one more coat of poly before bed.” Success, for him, is not about financial stability or prestige—it’s freedom. “On your own time, doing things your own way,” he says. “Pick my own days off. No clock in, no clock out.”
The work is gritty, unpredictable, deeply human. And it’s what he always wanted to do. “Sometimes I forget,” he says quietly. “I’m literally doing what I wanted to do.”
Any advice?
His advice for parents worried about their kids chasing dreams that don’t fit neatly into careers? He doesn’t hesitate. “If they’re happy and doing what they want, they’ll be fine. You can be a lawyer or a doctor and still be miserable, I know some of them. Maybe it’s better to just do the thing you were meant to do.” He laughs as another train thunders past.
Tony Frisell is still learning, still painting, still refining the imperfect line. Success, as he defines it, is a life painted by hand. And delivery trucks showing up before noon.
