Graffiti (after reading L.A.R. Editor's letter)
In the Letter Arts review 26:3 Christopher Calderhead (Editor) writes about the graffiti technique. I do hope you get to read his letter, it should be in the library soon. It got me thinking that I should try and find some graffiti in my home city and yes, we have graffiti and taggers. I met some today, articulate, keen to explain the process, they knew about calligraphy, and were kind enough to suggest other locations that they knew had examples. This one was on a derelict site in Glen Innes, huge concrete walls going nowhere. I forgot to measure them, a guess would be 30' x 10' high. The artist for this one was an australian and his style is different, he uses finer and sharper lines.
This one took several hours for two people to execute. It is drawn and written straight from the paint can and rollers. It was done by the couple I spoke to. They were packing up when we drove across the paddock to get up close. They were certainly colourful and stood out.
Can you decipher what this one says? The young woman said that there was a long wall down in Manukau City near the Supa Centre that has artwork all along it, so I headed for there next. I found more and more. I left out the tagging examples as that seems to be another sort of urban lettering, more personal signatures. This is graffiti lettering and early examples can be seen in Pompeii, they survived the volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Click on the images to see them larger.
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| Manukau City |
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| Manukau City |
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| Manukau City |
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| Manukau and Otahuhu Railyards |
Wow! These examples of graffiti are amazing and there is certainly a lot of thought and planning that goes into the work. They could easily be cartoonists and/or commercial artists. I never thought I'd see the day when they were alongide the work of NZCers.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment (our first). Mr Calderhead's article discussed the similarities between calligraphy and graffiti, and I could certainly see a link. It was interesting to see the graffiti life sized- that can't be portrayed here. I have not always captured the whole picture or been able to give an idea of scale in the photo. H
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