i sd, ‘i want to go to key west & write.’
he touched my shoulder.
he sd, ‘why dont you?’
i don’t know whut hit me.
i get mixed up with this guy.
next thing i know
i’m in print, collected & framed.

my eyes comb for words that jump out of the
sentence of time. i’m always gawking at text & crack
up when phlegm phlegms me or the wordtruck is truck.
my eyes dig gat, so i write sketch it—BLAM! sad or
mad, or happy as a clam, lewd, dead, drunk as a skunk.
always a surprise to me, the stuff words do in their
wordworld. in my eyes stickerbush is a sticker bush.

the origins of nicholsloy studio & why i do it.

~sloy

Sloy Collection

On Word Art 

i’m a writer. i collect colloquialisms— sometimes silly, always simple—
common words and phrases. in biker slang, ‘strawberries’ are chicks who
trade sex for drugs. ‘apehangers’ biker’s handlebars. we may not dig
strawberries or apehangers, but as poet richard hugo was fond of saying,
‘the imagination does.’ the look, the sounds and the images words evoke
is the turf of my work. sometimes the words go wonky on me. the letters
begin to take on a look a ‘feel’ and then the piece becomes something
unexpected and wild, strange to look at and crazy to read. that’s when
i’m really writing. that’s when writing comes alive and wriggles with
meaning and a life of its own.

~sloy

On panel cards

as with nic, i decompress but by note taking on panel cards…a shoring up against the loss of memory & the lines drawn.

~Sloy

Panel Cards

On the Origins of "Sloy"

Sloy (1943-2022) first came to our attention when we saw a page of her experimental calligraphic text that was printed in Émigré magazine No.32, 1994. We contacted her by mail in 1995 and made our first purchase of one of her artist books. The experimental container for this book was made by her husband, Dave Nichols (‘Nic’), who fabricates containers for her books from industrial, corrugated cardboard. Nic takes the cardboard from commercially printed boxes and then fashions ingenious locking mechanisms. We hold seven unique artist books and book objects replete with her calligraphic ink and embroidered thread drawings and about 20 handwritten and/or embroidered individual drawings. Our favorite Sloy book is “Iron Fist in Yr Yellow Chakra” (1998) that consists of 103 cards in a handsome container made by her husband Nic. The book consists of calligraphic drawings, one to a card that repetitively presents the title phrase or a minor modification in extremely varied letter styles, sizes, and line densities using ink, paint, lipstick, and graphite. I consider these cards a masterpiece of experimental calligraphy. We spent a delightful day with Sloy and Dave at their house in Salem, Oregon in 2009 and there I learned the origin of her name. She told us that she signed her given name (Sandra Loy) to her earlier paintings as “s. loy.” But onlookers could not easily read the period after the ‘s’ of her last name and called her Sloy, a name that stuck to her as a nom de plume.

~Ruth and Marvin Sackner

Nic on Sloy

i am a lucky man. half my life ago i stumbled onto a woman and a purpose. this juncture gave meaning to everything. what began then was a devotion/commitment to making things, books & pictures that called us to go further and to follow where it all took us. the more we worked, painting and writing were our first steps, the more making things was all we wanted to do. even the mundane,— having a job, mowing the lawn, doing laundry—became part of the working out of our vision.

~Nic