Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, May 11, 2021: Peter Greco, an American lettering artist, graphic designer, and typographer (#1280)

Peter Greco (1955) is one of America’s most experienced practitioners in the art of traditionally inspired, hand crafted lettering and typography. His continuos exploration and passion has enabled him to reach beyond design into the realm of fine art. Immediately after high school Peter Greco found employment at a top Manhattan architectural firm doing: detail drafting, model making, interior super-graphics and exterior signage systems. Turning to graphic design while specializing in typography he graduated from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1977. He then worked for International Typeface Corporation’s Photo-Lettering, designing alphabets, composing and editing type.

Peter Greco relocated to Los Angeles in 1979, where he has resided ever since. His successful freelance career includes projects for: CBS Records, Motown Records, Warner Bros. Music The Los Angeles Times, NBC Television, Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Disney Corporation, Sony Pictures and Lucas Film.

Peter has received awards of excellence from: The NY and LA Type Directors Club, Society of Illustrators, Print Design Annual, and Graphis International. While residing in the LA arts district he was a founding member of the Downtown Artists Development Association and the Concerned Artists Action Group. He continues to design logos and lettering art by hand as well as to produce “calligraffitti” street art, hand painted signs, and also interior and exterior typographic murals. His work has been exhibited in various art galleries in the Los Angeles area. In addition he has created an authentic body of Renaissance manuscript art as a library exhibit and as a graphic novel. For the past eight years he has been an instructor of Expressive Typography at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he also teaches a calligraphy workshop.

Downtown’s recent renaissance has served Greco’s later emergence as a fine artist whose practice blends the now-ness of street art with centuries-old calligraphic technique. On a wall inside the Arts District’s Eat Drink Americano gastropub, his 16-foot-high text work evokes old-timey sign painting. A couple blocks away, Greco’s 18-foot-long Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) painting on the front of the legendary American Hotel has become one of the area’s most Instagrammed murals. Dominated by an orb filled with script of an invented language that exists only in Greco’s mind, it gleams with gold and red paint across a base of green. “It was supposed to be up for three months. Three years later, it’s still there,” says Greco.

In his latter-day work, Greco has been shifting from the rigid practice of graphic lettering to a more imaginative style since beginning to practice as a Toltec, or man of knowledge. His increasingly abstracted typography looks at once like someone put ancient writing from every world culture in a blender—and like an altogether alien language of its own. “The reason that Arabic, Hebrew, Gothic and Roman calligraphy look the same to some extent is because of the tool: It’s a chisel pen,” says Greco, explaining that written languages, and calligraphy, all derive from just seven directional marks that can be made within a graphic space (such as vertical, horizontal, and left and right curves). “Elements of this exist in many cultures, but they never really put it together the way I did.” Which is to say that Greco, who was never formally trained in the calligraphic arts, is an ardent autodidact.

He has lately begun to call his art “Toltec calligraffiti,” in honor of his philosophy, his calligraphy and the fact that he’s become known for painting outdoors. “My calligraphy has nothing to do with the [pre-Columbian Mesoamerican] Toltec cult,” says Greco, 63, who grew up in New Jersey and studied at New York’s School of Visual Arts in the 1970s before relocating to L.A. in 1979. “My calligraphy is based on medieval and later developments of Gothic, so when I use the term ‘Toltec calligraphy,’ all I mean by that is me, a Toltec, who does calligraphy.”
Greco in front of his mural Save the Planet . He’s wearing a Calvin Klein jacket, made for his 2016 solo show at the former LosJoCos Gallery, on which he stenciled and hand-painted his Toltec calligraffiti designs.

Greco in front of his mural Save the Planet. He’s wearing a Calvin Klein jacket, made for his 2016 solo show at the former LosJoCos Gallery, on which he stenciled and hand-painted his Toltec calligraffiti designs.

Though he now resides with his wife, Yumi, in Pasadena, close to his job teaching at Art Center College of Design, Greco’s formative years in L.A. were spent Downtown in the ’80s and ’90s living in the Arts District, then a no-man’s land. He reminisces about the American Hotel’s long-closed legendary music venue Al’s Bar; how there used to be only one restaurant open on Sunday (the now-shuttered Vickman’s Restaurant and Bakery, where he ate strawberry pie); and a half-wolf he used to see roaming the streets leading a pack of wild dogs.

Innovative, spiritual and criminally unsung—Peter Greco’s art, either on the gallery wall or in the streets, is a perfectly Los Angeles specimen.

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Peter Greco

Greco in front of his mural Save the Planet.
He’s wearing a Calvin Klein jacket, made for his 2016 solo show at the former
LosJoCos Gallery, on which he stenciled and hand-painted his
Toltec calligraffiti designs