Most everyone who knows me knows I love street art. I think it is the most dynamic and energetic art around and it is a constant inspiration to me. Wherever I go, I am on the lookout for wonderful examples of graffiti. I have quite a collection of photographs of street art from all over the world. Of course, most of the images I have taken are those of local Philadelphia steet art and paste-ups–but there are some spectacular shots from travels in Greece, Spain, and of course, New York City, like the one above I took in SoHo last month.
In 1997 I had an epiphany about graffiti in Milan. The city of Milan is filled with architectural and sculptural wonders. It has an abundance of museums, foundations, and churches filled to the brim with important masterpieces. It is incongruous, then, that what impressed me most about Milan was its graffiti. The beautiful, historic buildings were covered with spray-painted vulgarities, messages to lovers, numbers, indecipherable names, and phrases from American pop culture.
At first, the sight of crumbling walls, three or four hundred years old, garbed in twentieth-century spray-paint writing, was shocking. I loathed the graffiti and the vandals who produced it. And then, a strange thing happened. My vision shifted and those graffiti covered walls became incredibly beautiful works of art. They were enigmatic, paradoxical images and I loved them!
The natural colors and textures of the walls—ochres, tans, grays and greens—combined with the graffiti in bright metallic and glossy spray-paint colors were not only impressive, they were outrageous! Another distinctive characteristic of the graffiti in Milan was its layering. The glyphs (or tags, the artists’ signatures) were constantly painted over by the building’s caretakers with small patches of paint that never quite matched the original building material. The layering of marks and depth of under-painting were as impressive as those found in any good abstract painting.
I also enjoyed thinking about the unconscious artistic collaboration taking place between the buildings’ owners and the graffiti artists. The persons who methodically painted over the graffiti to clean it up unwittingly gave the graffiti artist a beautiful surface to work upon—complete with under-painting and a palimpsest of prior markings. (For some excellent images of graffiti in Milan, check out these photos by Barrybar on Flickr. They are all outstanding images.)
And now, some 10 years later, I am still enamored of graffiti art. I find some amazing treasures on my city walks and document them with my digital camera. Street art is fresh, gritty and tough; sometimes it is humorous and fun, but mostly street art has a dangerous, subversive and underworld feeling about it. Graffiti is definitely an act of vandalism and rebellion that angers and annoys just about everyone. I admit I like that dark, subversive side of it, the danger and the thrill of tagging right out there on the streets…I suppose I’m a closet anarchist at heart. But I could never actually do graffiti–I can only photograph what I see and then incorporate that in my paintings on paper or canvas.
I cannot stop thinking about how energetic and beautiful street art is, how street art is really the art of NOW–not the work museums or galleries hang on their walls. And it is out there for everyone to see, everywhere on any given day.
There are some wonderful websites to see some really terrific street art. One of the most famous street artists is Bansky from the UK. His work is quite funny and charms everyone with his talent and point of view. Dan Witz is absolutely amazing. He is a New York street artist who studied at Cooper Union. His forte is to paint realistic imagery on areas that have already been tagged giving the wall a trompe l’oeil effect. The Wooster Collective has some great artists and images and stories…For further visual inspiration, there is a great article in Time Magazine Online that you can read called Art of the Street
I hope you have an epiphany!
Content and photos copyright 2007 by Janet Towbin.
