Lighting the Way: Neon

LOCAL LANDMARKS (top to bottom) A view from the US-101, looking onto neon-buzzing Hollywood skyline. / Larry Albright's crackle tube, as found in one of neon artist Lili Lakick's sculptures. / Huge "SPACE" letters from Space 15 Twenty, on North Cahuenga Blvd. / A light-scenic view onto Hollywood's Vine Ave. showing Patron, Hollywood & Vine and the Taft Building, lit in neon. / A TechnoLux sample suitcase, pictured in Lili Lakich's neon studio. / Fluorescent, neon-looking lights fixed in an empty Sunset Blvd. storefront.

Light alone has developed its share of good and bad. It would be a logical assumption to see struggle in associating those sharp, bright neon lights with any exceptional claim to beauty. But the hundred-year-old-plus medium still has its great followers and admirers, like neon artist and historian Don Concannon, who exercised his praise to a group of Southern California sign industry moguls during a California Sign Association meeting last month.

"Their elegant lines in shocking colors... Their garish sense of humor... How the colored lights penetrate the night so perfect... Go neon!" he went on excitedly. Similarly, neon artist Larry Rivers shared his view in the iconic 1979 book, Let There Be Neon. “Neon has gaiety, joy, pageantry. Circus qualities. I like it story-telling, information-giving qualities. The fact that it has to do with the night distinguishes it from all art forms. The canvas is the night.”

To briefly explain, neon is a chemical element extracted straight from the air and used as a gas pumped through glass tubes, producing (in its natural state) the ubiquitous red-orange glow we see everywhere. Tube manufacturers around the world, like EGL, TechnoLux and the now defunct Voltarc, have long produced tubes of varying colors, intensity and diameters by either coating or tinting them with color, or lining the inside with rich phosphorus powders. Another rare gas used just like neon is the wondrous blue argon, known as “The Lazy One” for its heaviness and lower resistance.

Add electricity, and viola. NEON.