You know there are some crazy cool grafitti drawings out in the streets now and I don’t know why this art form has such a bad press so much of the time.
Maybe its just because the media mainly focus on the damage that’s done to trains and such.
But listen up, there’s a message here for the suit and tie dead heads. The world doesn’t just belong to them. For the younger generation its a culture!
Sketching a history
Grafiti sketches, murals, paintings, names and tagging is where most newcomers begin but really you should start by asking yourself “what does it really mean?” to you.
Most people see it as something that emerged only in modern society, scribbled by urban youth on railway bridges.
However, its use can be traced back to ancient civilisations, such as the ancient Egyptians whose hieroglyphs could be considered an early form of the writing on the wall that we know today. One can even say that ‘writing’, as it translates, dates back to the origins of mankind itself, when Neanderthal man’s sense of his environment was expressed and communicated through cave drawings.
More often than not it has been characterised as vandalism due to its associations with the spray-painted drawings you often see plastered over buildings and walls in cities.
This urban art can be categorised in three common forms: Tags, Pieces and Labels.
All of us have walked down a street and seen various walls covered with the stuff, but can we differentiate one kind from another? The most common and the easiest to recognise is a tag.
Tags and Tagging
A tag is usually a simple one-coloured design (though it can be more complex). Put simply, it is a depiction of a writer or artist’s nickname or message, and its aim is to send a message to other writers.
A Piece or Character Design
A piece or masterpiece is a more complex form where a writer usually starts with some kind of pre-conceived plan or sketch. A piece tends to take this art more in the direction of character art, which has a big fanbase. People will often be able to distinguish a writer’s work by their character designs alone. Artists like D*Face, Insa, Sickboy and Inkie can all be recognised by the characters or symbols in their pieces.
Labels and Labelling
A label is when a writer’s tag or character design is printed on posters or stickers. Labels can be found in most cities around the world. This can be a great way for all kinds of artists to promote their art far and wide; usually tags are quite hard to see and they are only going to draw the attention of people interested in street art. You often see labels plastered on the back of street signs, lampposts, and anywhere with a smooth surface that can have something stuck to it.
Writing Globally
Although graff art seems to have been part of the mainstream for ages, it was not until the 1970s that it reinvented itself with a more modern term named writing, which first took root in the United States and later spread across the water to Europe.
The last decade has seen writing really take hold of the global art scene with celebrities emerging from the hub of graff artists around the world. It is only now that you hear about events like Secret Wars and people like American actress Angelina Jolie forking out 100,000 for an original piece by the notorious Bristol-born artist Banksy. Also, a new record was recently set when a piece went for a massive 280,000.
Grafitti art is the new cool, with hundreds of companies in the last few years jumping on the street art bandwagon. It is no longer just a shunned art form, yet it still manages to stay true to its origins by remaining accessible to the younger generation. Street art it seems is here to stay.
Author: N Graffer
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Here are some more articles and posts about the subject if you care to take a look…
Surely there were the OG graffers? They do have stuff in there if you look closely and are acknowledged as some of the early stick name writers of the city. We did try to contact them but had no luck.
For the first installment of Graff on Graffers I painted my good friend Masto. Masto aka Pheds One (Warfare Crew) grew up in the east of Sydney, spending a large portion of his time in Bondi.
How have the tees and going into ‘fashion’ been received by fellow graffers? Beef? PANIK: As soon as we started the whole clothing thing we got all the little graff haters whining about us more than ever but that was expected.
Saatchi’s presents ‘Dirty hands’
Who knows how these two graffers got hooked up with this saatchi gallery gig. For my mind you cant go past local guys like dmote, killpixie, numskull to name a few, although they wouldnt do a show like this, just be too corperate for them … Its just that if i see one more painted drip, or set of praying hands (usually clutching a string of rosary beads), or tatoo style script wrting, or coy fish, or typical straight lined style graf characters im gonna shoot my foot.
Aw, this was a really quality post. In theory I’d like to write like this also – taking time and real effort to make a good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate alot and never seem to get anything done… Regards