If you’re a fan of Nick Ringelstetter’s artwork then you’re bound to have seen his famous stop signs either in person or somewhere within the vast web of the Internet. This line seems to draw in a crowd all on its own, being that it is an unusual medium for artwork of any kind. If you’ve ever wondered what inspired Nick to take a common symbol and turn it into a fascinating wall hanging, buckle up, because you’re about to find out.
As a child, he had a unique leather jacket. With green leather sleeves, a black leather body, and a red stop sign on the back, this jacket was a favorite item of our artist’s. From a young age, stop signs were always intriguing to Nick, and that grew with him. He has said that it was never about the stop itself, but rather the aesthetic and shape of the signs that he’s always found pleasing.
But how did he go from enjoying this common road sign to placing his artwork on them? Well, during Nick’s high school years he was known to have a party or two on the family land out in the middle of nowhere. During one of these soirées, a friend of his showed up out of the blue, flying up the drive way and immediately backing up to the barn. When Nick came over to investigate, he realized that the bed of his friend’s truck was filled with traffic signs. Of course, due to the process of acquiring these signs, his friend couldn’t keep them, so they needed a home. They took the signs and stored them in the barn where they sat for years until the Ringelstetter’s sold the property.
When time came to clean out the barn, Nick’s dad had asked him what they should do with all of the signs. At this time, it was one of Nick’s first years of painting, and as he considered the possibilities he realized that he could paint the stop signs. What started out as a fun experiment quickly gained traction and turned into a popular product. People began offering money to our artist for these pieces, and at the time this was an amazing feat, as painting was still a hobby and not yet a fulltime career.
The stop signs became a niche for Ringelstetter, not unlike the skateboards he also paints. He has said that growing sick of creating on square canvases and exploring new mediums was not only vital to his career, but also important to his process as an artist. Switching things up and creating something new and different is what he feels keeps his art fresh and intriguing. And from a business standpoint, the marketing here is rather genius. If you see even one of these customized stop signs, it’s likely to nest in your brain, only to emerge when you find yourself pressing your vehicle to a halt for a brief pause, and there your mind will take you back to a time when your reality was bent in a new direction.
Fascinating as this line of art may be, it certainly was not the easiest thing to create. Painting on a stop sign may not seem like the most difficult of projects, but recreating the prints is a different beast of its own. When the stop signs were first created, metal printing didn’t exist. Nick played with the idea of creating these on octagon canvases, but it just didn’t feel right. To him, a stop sign had to be an actual stop sign.
It wasn’t until about four years later that a coworker at Nick’s factory job brought in some stuff printed on metal and made Nick’s day. He proceeded to do the prints for a while, but as one could imagine printing on aluminum is an expensive business venture. So while Nick was pursing his career as a fulltime artist he had to pull the Stop Sign line for a while in order to cut costs. But as Hostess discovered when they removed Twinkies from their product line, Nick too discovered that once you take away an option, people begin to crave that which they can no longer have.
When the artist was able to reintroduce this line again, people were ecstatic and the product began to fly off of the shelves. Lucky are those who jumped in line to purchase because all of Ringelstetter’s art is limited edition, and there may come a day when the stop signs disappear again, most likely creating space for a new, unheard of medium.
Darienne Keniece