Typewriter Drawings is a series of drawings made using only the punctuation and letter keys on a standard mechanical typewriter. Clayton uses a 1957 portable Smith-Corona Skyriter on antique, letter-size typewriter paper. Each work carries physical traces of the making process, including folds that enable the paper to move in all directions through the carriage, often many hundreds of times. Responding to the typewriter as a machine to transcribe, communicate, or duplicate, the subjects are often drawn from direct observations of daily life. To date over 500 drawings have been made.
Typewriter Drawings are held in the collections of The Carnegie Museum of Art, PA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Blanton Museum of Art, TX; SFMoMA, CA; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, PA; University of New Mexico Art Museum, NM; The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, IA; as well as many private collections.
Typewriter Drawings have also been featured in Creative Nonfiction, Google Span Reader, Typewriter Art by Barrie Tullett, in the newly published Wit’s End - The Science, Psychology and Soul of Wit by James Geary and in the upcoming Economics of Visual Art by Amy Whitaker. Through a program called Start with Art, each of the babies born in Pittsburgh, PA in November 2017 received a print of a typewriter drawing of the moon.