Have you ever seen anyone doing grafitti?
Mark K May 21st, 2009
You see grafitti everywhere – well, maybe not the spectacular mural pictured here, but you see the scribbling on a bathroom wall, the spraypainted tags on a bus shelter, or a political slogan on the side of a building. The strange thing, when I think about it, is that I’ve never really seen anyone creating the grafitti.
Maybe that’s not totally true – I’m pretty sure I’ve seen someone write something – a phone number, a joke, or a stick figure. The ones that amaze me are the huge murals that you see in cities. You’re driving down the freeway and there is a huge, multi-colored work of art – something that probably took hours to create with sophisticated equipment and perhaps a team of talented artists. They are often placed somewhere that seems almost impossible to reach – you would need a ladder, scaffolding, or mountain-climbing equipment. Beside that, you would have to remain perched, hanging over a freeway for hours. Surely, even in the middle of the night, someone would see you and the police would be notified. How is it possible for someone to remain in such a precarious position long enough to complete the task?
There are people who believe the lunar landing is a giant hoax, that NASA didn’t really send men to the moon, but rather created the illusion in some Hollywood studio. Do we really know that people create these masterpieces of street art? Is it possible that invisible aliens come in the dead of night and splash them on the wall with air brush light sabers in a instant when no cars are passing?
I wasn’t present on the moon in 1969, so I can’t say definitively whether or not the astronauts landed there. And to this day, I’ve never seen grafitti artists at work, so I don’t really know if there works are created by people.
But I’m still looking.
- musings
- Comments(1)
Very good point Mark! Even in my neighborhood, which presents more opportunities to catch someone doing graffiti than most, I’ve never caught anyone in the act. LA seems to be the place that has the most elaborate designs on freeway overpasses etc and I too often wonder how someone gets up there and then has the time to do such detailed work.
The other day I was taking the kids to school when I turned the corner by our neighborhood park and saw that someone had painted the male genitalia (a true graffiti classic!!) on one of the rocks in front of the park. I didn’t say anything and wondered if the kids would notice. Trevor did not, but Sarah did, and it was a bit amusing to hear her reaction and ensuing explanation of what she saw to Trevor. Of course, they were both somewhat disappointed to see that it was painted over by the time we came back past there later that afternoon!