Graffiti Detail

There is some great street art around these days. This isn't it. This is old-style name tagging with a few vulgar, angry words thrown in. However, close-up there is still great beauty to be found in such paintwork. It lies in the combination of paint colours and shapes, material textures and the inevitable weathering that slowly works to make our urban surfaces more appealing.

These photographs come from the town of Frome in England where I grew up and still visit every year but they could have come from any town or city in just about any country. This long wall down a quiet cul-de-sac was new to me and it has little appeal until you get down to the detail, which always helpfully removes any sense of the context.

Sometimes it is simply the abstract shapes and colour patterns directly created by the artist. Isolated from the meaning of what has been written on the wall there are some lovely compositions to be found beyond the original artist's intentions.

When this is combined with an interesting texture on the substrate, whether it's cement, brick, wood or metal, then it starts to become something more than a human creation.

Once weathering has started to work its magic and pull the paint back towards nature with its patterns of repetition-with-variation, then there really are some beautiful details. These gems can take some finding. I spent almost an hour wandering along this wall studying it closely and taking pictures. A couple of vans went passed but not wanting to look suspicious I didn't glance at the occupants.

The lines in this one are a good, simple example of what I mean by repetition-with-variation.

Just next to the graffitied wall was this old road-sign that had weathered nicely.

I love the way the growth of lichen has added to the naturing of this graffiti to give it an almost coral-like feel.

It looks suspiciously like the rain arrived before this graffiti was dry...

This one could almost be frost on a tendril of ivy but it is actually paint from a graffiti artist who either didn't notice it or didn't care enough to pull it off first. I don't mind graffiti but seeing paint sprayed over living plants saddened me a bit. I was tempted to pull it off to see what the stenciled version looked like but didn't.

Finally, that wonderfully weathered eye complete with cracked make-up and eye-lashes plus a few more wide views of the site.