A Deluxe Limited Edition of 50 Fine Art Lithographs of the DEFECTIVE CHARACTERS alphabet

23 Plates and 40 Colors on Top Quality 15” x 18” Arches Watercolor Hot Press White 300g Paper

Hand-Printed and Published by the esteemed PS Marlowe Fine Arts

There is a long tradition of artists using visual representations of the alphabet to convey ideas, emotions, and even propaganda. This has been part of the printmaking tradition for more than 500 years. Our goal is to make a work that fits within this tradition and tells a particular story. Defective Characters speaks to these times with our heightened awareness of mental health, anxiety and other harmful maladies, using dark humor to illuminate a serious topic. In creating this work we used only the most traditional printmaking methods to create a piece with a contemporary and popular aesthetic.

Phil Sanders / PS Marlowe Fine Arts

Defective Characters is a play on words: In typography, a character is a symbol representing a letter, numeral, punctuation mark, or other unit of language.

I also think of my alphabet as 26 defective 'characters’ who live and breathe in some kind of bizarre comic book world.

This work is fun and funny, to be sure. But for me the context is also deeply serious and spiritual. The title also refers to Character Defects - the negative traits and behaviors that ruin lives and make people generally miserable.

Every letter is inspired by a specific incident in my life - something I felt, experienced, or witnessed. Thus, A is for Apathy, C is for Cruelty, H is for Hopelessness, R is for Resentment, T is for Terror, W is for Workaholism, and so on.

This piece represents my own personal journey in coming to terms with negative experiences and emotions, and transforming them into something creative, beautiful, and ultimately joyous.

Stylistically, this work is influenced by everything I absorbed coming of age in NYC in the 1970s. The air was thick with graffiti, comic books, and the exploding Street Art movement with all its Pop Art connections. I devoured it all. On the weekends I lived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA. My heroes were Warhol, Picasso, Dali, Breughel, Bosch, and most influential of all, the anonymous Egyptian geniuses who lived from the 33rd-28th Centuries BC, who invented all those brilliant, cartoony, sideways-standing figures and symbols that I love so dearly.

Max Rosen