“People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that’s only if it’s done properly.”
Banksy, an anonymous English graffiti artist.
To the untrained eye, graffiti is the defacement of public property, the end product of street-yahoos making their names known to anybody who walks by. It is unfocused and sprawling, totally unlike the framed works hung in the gallery two streets across the business district, and it ungraciously demands its audience to acknowledge some unknown figure with a taste for omnipresence.
Graffiti, however, is a largely misunderstood art form, if indeed the people will even accept it as one. What’s important is that toys, writers, taggers, and painters (all argot in the graffiti world) are completely uninvolved with people who’d claim themselves to be recognised as legitimate artists.
Graffiti is also criticized for being too hard to understand, but certainly this cannot keep graffiti art from being art anymore than the obscurity of abstract art or Picasso’s cubism prevents either one of those hard to understand art forms from being considered as art. Its shapes, fonts, richness of colours, and the interaction it has with the environment as well as an arrangement of the elements into structures qualify it aesthetically as being art. Here’s 38 handpicked graffiti and street art images that have inspired me, and I would like to share them with you. Let your eyes feast!
Graffiti And Street Art Images
Cork Graffiti arist, Cork Corp.
Contest graffiti in Cergy during the 100Contest Festival
Girl running out of the debris
Cute Sponge Bob character graffiti
Graffiti art found in Hasselt (Belgium), artist Hertkore
Gory graffiti at an abandon place in Berlin
Russian graffiti artists da536, from Essentuky town of Russia.
Trees on the background complements street art in the foreground.
Graffiti in brighter and colourful shades.
Graffiti at Catherine Street near Place des Arts in Montreal.
Cartoon pigeon graffiti in a littered environment.
New York City – Traffic light in the foreground is camouflaged with the building.
Graffiti animals – Athens, Greece
Graffiti for a marketing campaign
Black and white graffiti in England
Graffiti of a Geisha in San Fransico
Graffiti-Style Snazzy Art in Cincinnati
As you can see from some of the above images, the recognition of graffiti art or street art as art through social, political, and economic influence of the art world helps to increase the awareness and overall understanding of the art form. This recognition prevents the sweeping generalisation that all graffiti is vandalism and therefore something that always should be removed.
What’s your thought of graffiti or street art? Have you seen any other cool graffiti or street art?