Tyree Callahan is a painter based in Bellingham, Washington. Usually, his paintings tend toward the abstract, but his new objet trouvÃ©, the Chromatic Typewriter, is very concrete. It's a sturdy vintage typewriter upgraded with colored keys, and turned into a kind of mechanized paintbrush.











Callahan got the idea when he tried to use an old typewriter in his studio to add text to one of his in-progress paintings. "Seeing that art in the typewriter's carriage," he explains, "just made me think of how interesting it would be to be able to 'type' up a painting." It took a few months to find a suitable typewriter and modify it so that the keys would work. Because you can't automatically reapply different colors of paint to different keys -- a typewriter ribbon only applies black ink -- you can't really use it to create the sort of saturated, edge-to-edge painting you see in the first two photos above. But Callahan has used it to create the "paragraph" you see in the third image, which, in my opinion, is quite beautiful.

If you're fascinated by the purely visual possibilities of type, or by what Callahan calls "the practice of writing as art," then you might enjoy Johanna Drucker's beautiful book The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination, or Jean Holland's gorgeous, minimalist Vladimir Nabokov: Alphabet in Color. And don't miss Callahan's more traditional paintings, which you can view at his website.