00:00My name's Andrew Grundon, my business is called Signature Signs. I've been painting signs
00:08since 1998 and prior to that I had a career as an artist. I started to go to a college
00:15called Tresham College in Kettering in Northamptonshire where I lived at the time. When I left there
00:20one of the lecturers asked me what I was going to do when I moved down to Cornwall and I
00:23said I'm going to start painting pictures for a living. And he said it'll never work.
00:27I said what do you mean it'll never work? He said you're useless. He said you haven't
00:32got the right kind of ethic for it. He said you're about as much use as a twiglet with
00:36all the marmite sucked off. And that has stuck in my mind ever since. A delightful thing
00:40for a lecturer to say to a student as they're leaving their care and going out into the
00:43world. A friend of mine told me about the sign writer at Sarstall Brewery who was retiring
00:48so I should go for the job and I did. I got the job on the strength of the fact that I
00:51could paint good pictorial signs for them. So I came out from their employment but I
00:56brought the contract with me when I came. I've gradually been building the client base
01:00since then, making use of the dreaded internet to advertise myself. One thing led to another
01:06and now I work for international PR companies, sometimes television companies, all sorts
01:13of different organisations, film stars, royal households. So there's quite a nice variety
01:19of stuff and I still do brewery stuff as well. I still paint pub signs just for pubs. The
01:24one with the farrier working on the horse, that's to go on the old smithy at Ivy Bridge
01:28which is a very old and a very small pub and I've painted the signs for there many times
01:32over the years since 1998. And each time I repaint a sign for a pub, paint it afresh,
01:39I go back and I look at it again and I get different source material, try and get it
01:46more detailed, try and do it better than I did before and sort of take it up a notch.
01:51From the 1970s onwards, everything got very formulaic and very computerised, very precise,
01:57very clean, very crisp and completely lost its soul. And it didn't have that handmade
02:03feeling of authenticity or integrity about it of when you've actually got somebody who's
02:08learned how to pull a perfect letter S or to paint a good pictorial sign. In recent
02:14years, even pre-Covid, people had started to come back around to thinking, you know
02:19what, I'm kind of tired of all of this formulaic plastic stuff. There's been a groundswell
02:26of people looking for more integrity, not just in signs but I think in everything, in
02:30handmade pottery, in hand-painted pictures, in all these things. People have realised
02:35that they're missing something when everything is created by a computer. There's an intangible
02:42spirit and a soul that is kind of imbued into something that is created from the heart of
02:48an artist or a creative person or a craftsman. The biggest crime that AI has committed is,
02:54for me personally, it has stolen my ability to wonder. Whereas I used to look at those
03:01things and think, that's incredible, that photographer was really fortunate to capture
03:04that moment or that artist must be so talented to make that thing happen. Now the first thing
03:09that happens is I look at it and I think, is it real? Is that an actual thing or is
03:15it AI? Then it's stolen something a lot more important than just the financial remuneration
03:21for the artist. It's taken away your ability to wonder and that is a crime.
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