Why I think graffiti is shit

A lot of my mates are graffiti artists, a lot of them are very skilled and are very good at what they do, a lot of them are very supportive of what I do regardless of how crap it is and how little of it there may be...but I sometimes struggle to return the favour.

I just can't get into graffiti.

For a start many graffiti artists seem to have a problem with colour. They're definitely not afraid to use it, and that's a good thing but it's just that typically there's not a lot of thought put into how it's being used. So often you see some terrible, terrible, colour choices and from what I've seen, all in all, that's par for the course.

An example of this was when I saw a graffiti canvas being produced. Initially a background will be sprayed on; random colours, a few splats, whatever, and the artist might produce a few of these, stockpile them, and then just whack something on top of them later, regardless of colour, composition, etcetera. It's all very slapdash; sometimes it works, a lot of the time it doesn't.

I come from a background where you need to plan things out; you don't need to be totally anal about it, you can be loose when you're painting your final piece but at the very least you might have a rough thumbnail sketch or colour study to give an idea of what you're working towards, you've still got room for artistic flourishes along the way, but you have a plan, a clear idea of where you want to take things. And when you prepare a surface you do it with a specific result in mind, you lay down a specific ground colour knowing that you'll use it in translucent areas or that it makes up a massive part of a midtone or something; not just abitrarily chuck something on there so that you don't have to contend with a white canvas.

Arbitrary. That's how I feel about the subject matter as well. Names, adopted pseudonyms seemingly chosen at random, painted again and again ad infinitum. Why? What for? Why those names, why those letters in particular? I just struggle to see the point, maybe if all you care about is climbing into places, having a little adventure, and sticking your name up somewhere for people to see it, if it's purely a graffiti thing then fair enough, but when you identify yourself as an artist, as a craftsman..I dunno. It's not that I think that it's low brow or anything like that, we could all do without that sort of pretentiousness, it's just you could potentially be the greatest painter in the world but if all you do is paint the same handful of letters over and over are you really pushing yourself? Are you really challenging yourself? Stretching your abilities? Doesn't it all get a bit samey, even if you do mix up the styles a bit now and then? Don't you get to a saturation point beyond which you're not having to even think anymore; where you're painting on auto-pilot and just knocking these pieces out?

My last problem is a text one. Graffiti is, supposedly, all about the letters, about the text. It's something I generally shy away from myself but I respect good use of typography when I see it, love a good juxtaposition of text and image...clever, inventive, use of text can be a really beautiful thing. I don't generally see it in graffiti though. You get a lot of talk about letters and typography but half the time what you see is an impenetrable mish mash of letters painted by grafitti artists for the benefit of other graffiti artists. There's a definite language to it, but for anyone on the outside looking in it's all very cryptic and indecipherable. Personally I think any successful image, whatever the subject matter, whatever the medium, should be easily read. It should be a visual form of communication, something you can see and decipher at a glance...and for me, personally, a lot of graf fails in this area more than any other.

I like the idea of having art on our streets and big murals out where people can see them, I think it brightens things up, it can take a drab and dreary street and elevate it into something much more pleasant. But it would be nice if maybe some of the grafitti you see wasn't structured in this private code for the eyes and appreciation of other writers, but designed so that a wider audience could appreciate it.

That doesn't require a loss in style or technique, merely a shift in thinking.