If you ask Shawn Gilheeney how he became Rhode Island’s go-to “sign guy”, his answer takes you across the Ocean State and beyond. Gilheeney, whose work as Providence Painted Signs is featured on “ART inc.”, has deep roots in Rhode Island.
In Coventry, where Gilheeney grew up, he would skateboard to meet his friends at the local grocery store parking lot. He eventually moved to Providence, where in the late 90s skateboarding faced the ire of its elected officials, eventually becoming banned. That was Shawn’s sign to head out of town.
“Skateboarding had become illegal in Providence and so I knew some people out in California and it seemed like the best thing to just leave here.”
And so he does, first to San Francisco, then Los Angeles, Monterey, San Diego, and Seattle. The whole time he’s filming skateboard videos and selling custom-painted boards at skateparks across the West Coast.
“Eventually I was on a big skateboard road trip (and) destroyed my knee, moved back (to Rhode Island) to get insurance to get my ACL fixed because my mom worked for the state and I was under 25 and I could still get on her insurance,” explained Gilheeney.
At every stop along the way, including his injury-induced return to Rhode Island, Gilheeney is in one way or another working as an artist. From Gilheeney’s fine art projects to offset printing, woodblock cutting, and eventually sign painting. He had been turned on to it when living in Seattle, and once he was back in Providence, he became more involved.
“Johan Bjurman was a fine artist and a billboard painter here that once he started to retire, he reached out and started to sell me some of his old equipment and show me how to rig the side of buildings.”
This led to one of Gilheeney’s largest projects to this day, the mural outside Trinity Repertory Company.
Over the years, the work grew steadily for his company Providence Painted Signs, and so did the number of murals and signs Gilheeney painted across the state, especially in Providence, that you could see while driving around.
“I realized it driving around, seeing all my signs. Some of them started to look old and some of them started to fade and then I’m like, “Oh whoa.” Gilheeney said “It’s a weird feeling to see your own time map out there. It’s strange.”
But in February of 2023, Gilheeney faced a setback that threatened his ability to continue sign painting.
“I had an injury with my table saw doing two things in sequence that I knew I shouldn’t do and destroyed the top half of my index finger and the saw blade went through the knuckle on my middle finger.”
The top half of Gilheeney’s index finger couldn’t be reattached, which left him with lots of questions about the future of his work.
“I knew I was in trouble and it would probably would’ve taken a miracle to save it,” Gilheeney shares at his Providence Painted Signs studio, “They didn’t know if I’d be able to use my middle finger at all. So I mean it was definitely scary in that way where so much of my life has been based around that finger in that way where I look at all these old photographs and it’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s the finger that I was using and it’s not there anymore.""
Eventually, Gilheeney began working again, adapting to use his middle finger to keep painting. The endless photos he has from the months after the injury underscore just how delicate his work is, and how a fine of a touch is required. As he explained to us while working on a gold-leaf mural for J Marcel, a clothing store on Hope Street in Providence, “Amazingly it’s all on the wrist, not on the fingers. So after a little while, once I healed up and went through physical therapy to rehabilitate the middle finger, it wasn’t too, too hard, considering.”
It wasn’t too hard, considering.
This seems to sum up Gilheeney’s approach to his life and work. If skateboarding gets banned? Find somewhere new to live. Tear an ACL? Get it fixed and find new things to do. Cut off an essential part of your painting hand? Use your middle finger and adjust. Gilheeney still has more surgeries and recovery left ahead of him. But whatever setbacks it may create, he’ll be sure to figure out a way to keep painting signs.
“Hand-painted signs, just have the subtle imperfections that let you know a human was there because we’re not perfect,” he adds “I never thought of myself as being super talented, but I always just worked really hard at it and just kept going and didn’t get discouraged too much and just would, I don’t know, just persevere through all of it.”
