Joseph Giampino can’t find any emerald-green paint.
Half-pint cans of 1 Shot lettering enamel paint are stacked in every corner of his Maywood Road studio, bursting at the seams alongside tool cabinets, specialty brushes, graffitied walls, old signs, and a dizzying array of other physical media.
“It’s organized chaos,” Giampino tells the INDY on a recent Thursday morning. “It looks like a mess, but I know where everything is. Certain things never leave their spot.”
Sifting first through stacks of rare photo books before showing off a restored bubblegum machine inlaid with 23-carat gold leaf, the 47-year-old Raleigh sign painter takes his time pursuing that day’s shade: color code 142-L on the 1 Shot spectrum.
“It’s a green I’ve already done,” he says—the Bend Bar in Boylan Heights needs a replacement glass door repainted. “So if I don’t find it on the first pass, it might be in my box. Or over there. I’m not worried.”
Surrounded by towers of cassette tapes, Japanese anime novels, Philadelphia sports ephemera, old boxing gloves, freshly screen-printed T-shirts, and other tools of his trade, Giampino is right at home. The chockablock collection has grown since 2015, when his friends at Trophy Brewing Company bought the Maywood Road location for their brewery and taproom and gave Giampino carte blanche to take over an auxiliary building.
At first, he thought it’d be a good space to store the equipment he used as a working DJ. But after 10 years on that full-time grind, Giampino had grown sick of the grueling hours. His wife, Gina, encouraged him to combine his artistic urges—hip-hop, graffiti, street photography, and magazine design (he published Oak City Hustle for two years)—with his BFA from UNC Greensboro and chase a new creative pursuit.
Reading up on sign painting, he became obsessed: “I bought every single book I could find, every single paintbrush I could afford, all the paint. And I sat in front of an easel and drew and painted, and drew and painted.”
His first attempts at lettering came courtesy of Micky Slicks, a charismatic buddy whose “Micky-isms” gave Giampino plenty of wordplay to work with. Another friend, Raleigh goldsmith Lauren Ramirez, asked him to paint a sign for her new studio. Chris Powers at Trophy Brewing set him loose to decorate their rapidly growing mini-empire.
Giampino was hooked: He was setting his own schedule for the first time in a decade and working outside, immersed in the built environment, something he had obsessed over for years as a diehard skateboarder. And he was plying a hands-on trade rooted in hundreds—even thousands—of years of commercial tradition.
“I learned the rules before I broke the rules,” he says. “I learned by messing up, just like in skateboarding, where to hop off a set of stairs, you have to fall 10 times before you make it. When I started painting, I said, ‘My God, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.’ But you figure it out.”
Only nine years after embarking as a novice on that sign-painting journey, Giampino’s work, under the SPCL Signs moniker (a transmogrification of his DJ name, SPCL GST), is splashed across more than 1,500 businesses in and around Raleigh. Dive bars, coffee shops, pretzel joints, yoga studios, tattoo parlors, corner markets—you name it, Giampino has painted it.
“A lot of artists I know are naturally talented,” he says. “I didn’t have that when I started out. But I was willing to work harder than anybody to compensate for it. That’s always been the mentality of my life: you’re gonna fail, but you gotta challenge yourself to the fullest.”
That determination has fueled Giampino’s prolific work. He’s done murals for Dreamville Fest and restored old Coca-Cola, 7-Up, and Pine State Creamery signs. He’s painted parking garages for mixed-use developments, corrugated signs for regenerative farms, subtle signage for hair salons, and inspirational messages for city parks. He prefers to work with up-and-coming independent businesses that exude their own sense of singular style. But he’s also down to do big jobs for the major developers changing the skyline of the Oak City.
Giampino moved from his native northern New Jersey to Greensboro for high school, followed by college; after bouncing between New York City and Philadelphia, he moved back South, calling Raleigh home since 2010.
“I love it here. To me, Raleigh feels quiet in a good way. I know how to talk to people. When they see me, they know who I am,” he says. “I have a face—I’m not just a persona behind the screen. I’m involved in every part of the process: shaking the client’s hand when they hire me, making the patterns, chasing down the paint, looking them in the eye when the job is done, and calling it a day. There’s a little bit of me in every sign.”
But since he wears his heart on his sleeve (and skin—countless tattoos pay tribute to, among other things, his family, creativity, and his lifelong love of Philly sports), Giampino knows he has to rein himself in sometimes.
“I’m a knucklehead,” he says. “I have a chip on my shoulder and a bullshit meter to the max. But that’s just where I grew up, in a blue-collar Italian Irish neighborhood—if you tried to hide what you felt, you’d get walked all over. So I’ve had to humble myself.”
Humility is a must in this day and age, when AI can churn out artistic creations and one-click vinyl sign printing proliferates across the internet with pitches like “Order today, ship tomorrow!” and “Big, bold, and fade-resistant!” Those signs can be affordable, but they typically only last a year or two, especially in the North Carolina sun, before needing to be replaced.
I’m involved in every part of the process: shaking the client’s hand when they hire me, making the patterns, chasing down the paint, looking them in the eye when the job is done, and calling it a day. There’s a little bit of me in every sign.”
Hand-painted signs, by contrast, can easily last for decades. But finding a traditional painter isn’t exactly easy; according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 206,000 artists identify as “painters,” with fewer than 1,000 classified as “sign painters.” Hard numbers are nearly impossible to come by—a career website uses the questionably accurate number of 536, while Giampino says he only knows of four or five currently working in North Carolina.
That wasn’t always the case; sign painting boomed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when businesses across small-town USA advertised their wares on building exteriors. The trade appears in accounts of the guild-based economy of medieval Europe and even in ancient Rome, where outdoor signage for shops followed the footpaths that sprouted as the empire expanded.
Reinforcing his belief in himself as more of a working tradesman than a fine artist, Giampino mentions a passage in one of the earliest textbooks on sign painting, James Callingham’s 1890 book Sign Writing and Gloss Embossing: “A baker who makes a shapeless loaf of bread has the satisfaction of knowing that it will soon be consumed; but the work of the sign-writer is, for the most part, exposed so long to the public view, that it is worth an effort to make the letters carefully, so that employer and employed may be satisfied, and the eye not offended with the work of the hand.”
Somehow, Giampino can easily expound on such histories while still preparing for his job at the Bend. He follows a detailed step-by-step process that, he says, might not be written down anywhere but is permanently etched into his brain.
First, he warms up by drawing slanted, casual letters. Next, he “does a pattern,” tracing the designs for a project onto contact paper. Then, he uses a pounce machine—essentially, an electrified heat stick—to burn tiny holes in the paper. Next, he gathers his equipment.
“Everything has a purpose. The most challenging thing is understanding your tools. If you don’t know how to use your tools, then you can’t succeed.”
A mahlstick—a brace with a soft, padded head that supports a painter’s arm and keeps their hands out of the paint—and a level are a must. At least five different metal toolboxes (one emblazoned with “HAVE BRUSH WILL TRAVEL!”) contain a dizzying array of brushes, mineral spirits, filters, and other hyperspecific tools. A rugged plastic Husky case contains tape, pounce chalk, tarps, and paint rollers. A Timbuktu bag—exactly 30 years old, Giampino notes, purchased in August 1995 before his first day at Guilford Tech Community College—contains drop cloths, numerous rolls of paper towels, and coveralls for cold days.
“Everything has a purpose,” he says. “The most challenging thing is understanding your tools. If you don’t know how to use your tools, then you can’t succeed.”
He double-checks each tool he needs for today’s job. Folding ladders line the back of his Toyota Tacoma. But still, the paint: “I know it’s here somewhere,” he says, returning inside.
He zeroes in on a cardboard box stacked precariously against the doorframe and pulls out a can—142-L, emerald green. “I knew I’d find it,” he says.
The lunch pail, the tool boxes, the paint-splattered clothes, the pickup truck—it hearkens back more to an old mechanic’s garage than an artist’s studio. “I’m a blue-collar craftsman who went to art school,” Giampino says. “I’ve been in art shows, but I don’t consider myself an artist. My brushes are my wrenches.”
Rapid-fire, he delivers an insider’s array of sign-painting lingo. Fitches are outdoor wall brushes Giampino buys in bulk and then breaks in half. (“They’re too long for me,” he jokes.) A box of gold-leaf supplies contains gilder tips, squirrel-hair brushes, loose leaf, and patterned gold that runs thousands of dollars a sheet, different supplies for Boston gild and Chicago gild techniques. “My brain works very fast,” he says. “ADHD can be a flaw—I have peaks and valleys. You gotta learn balance.”
Once he prepares to paint, however, he enters a flow state. He cleans today’s canvas—the new glass door at the Bend Bar—with glass cleaner. He measures and, with a water-soluble Stabilo grease pencil, marks the spot for taping up a pattern. He levels and chalks it before returning to the tailgate of his Tacoma to prep a paint station.
With the emerald-green paint in hand, he mixes, thins, and meticulously removes “crumbs” with a fine mesh strainer. He steps on the lid to reseal the paint and dips the tip of his fresh brush with neat’s-foot oil, a nondrying concoction typically used on horse saddles. Once paint meets glass, Giampino ticks off another list of techniques. He spin-dries his brush between both hands to remove excess moisture, then “pallets,” “swings,” “snaps,” and “chisels” it, depending on the thickness of each letter and the required control of each stroke. Muscle memory glides him through straight, concise letters, while he saves the curves of “S” and “2” and “5” for later.
His hands steady, his lines sharp, his voice drops: “My brain is quiet now. I’m stupid fast-paced, which is why I like painting so much—it forces me to slow down.”
After an hour or so, the work is almost done. Giampino peels back his tape, wipes away a few stray marks, and says, “One more thing.” Grabbing the grease pencil tucked into his hat, he scrawls the word “HOURS” in freehand, applying this final touch in a streetwise script that’s looser—jazzier, even—than the numbers. Stepping back, he’s satisfied: “Now, this is done.”
Of course, as with most occupations, the work never ends. After packing up, he uses a Theragun on his left elbow, which, flexed rigidly for hours, suffers from a form of golfer’s elbow. After returning to the studio, he sends invoices, chases payments, calls prospective clients, and haggles over logistics for upcoming jobs at Dorothea Dix Park and Transfer Company.
Giampino’s inner skeptic also pipes back up once the Zen-like act of painting is over. He admits to a lifelong sense of impostor syndrome—“People are constantly floating your boat, even if deep down inside, you just don’t feel like you’re that good”—and acknowledges the ongoing difficulty of business matters, the likelihood that AI will encroach on his work, and the inevitabilities of an aging body.
But he’s also proud of one thing in particular: that most of his paintings will still be there three, maybe even four decades from now—far longer than the one or two years that a vinyl sign might last. Whether running his fingers along the edge of a freshly finished sign or driving by his 25-foot “Love Respect and Kindness” mural, it’s hard for him to hide the pride he takes in his work.
“As long as I keep a good head on my shoulders, talk to people with respect, and do the best job I can, I’m going to be A-OK,” he says. “I might fail today, but my daughter also might walk around Raleigh one day long after I’m gone and be like, ‘My dad painted that sign 30 years ago.’ How cool and romantic is that?”
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