Painted Cities by Lorna Brown

Author:Lorna Brown [Brown, Lorna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Anima

REVS and COST, Highline, New York.

Handpainted billboard. Brooklyn, New York.

Near the Holland Tunnel, New Jersey. Featuring INDECLINE, buff monster, COST, Nychos, MSK.

‘Home’, Brooklyn, New York. Featuring Joeiurato x Logan Hicks and Killz Montana.

LOS ANGELES

USA

Los Angeles: a city filled with people who shared the dream of seeing their name in lights. Those who desired to be known and to stand out from the crowd were often moved by an urge so similar to what motivated many graffiti writers that the parallels were uncanny. Home to Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard and the Walk of Fame and to those who had made it, in their huge Beverly Hills mansions. Home also to the many more who were sacrificing everything in the hope of one day receiving the acclaim that they dreamed of.

Whilst New York is often given credit for the birthplace of graffiti and tagging (in the form that we know it today), it was Los Angeles where the different environmental factors played into innovating new ways of ‘getting up’. A sprawling city of freeways, the painting of graffiti on freeway signs, known as ‘heavens’, gained more attention and was a daring alternative to train bombing, the East Coast favourite for ‘getting up’. The car rather than subway culture played a large role in this difference. If the goal of successful graffiti was to get as many eyes to notice it as possible, this was a clever solution. Another element feeding into the Los Angeles style came from the Chicano gang graffiti of the Sixties and Seventies that had a carefully meticulous hand style. This played some part in writers of the Eighties and Nineties taking time over their writing, pulling in elements of calligraphy and handwriting, often elegant and comprised of a single line.

I cycled around the downtown arts district with my guide, a local graffiti writer called Carlos. Bikes were the best way to cover the large areas between the industrial buildings and to cross under the freeways whilst still allowing us to stop every hundred metres so that I could shoot reference photographs and hear stories. We passed several different people working on murals under a bridge, and Carlos stopped and chatted to them all. Cache K4P was one of them, part way through painting a new wall. I saw a slice of the community aspect of a world so often talked about in terms of being individualistic or even egocentric. We paused at the work of some of the more famous street artists and I was surprised to see the lower half covered in tags and throw-ups.

A rebellion was happening: a conflict between the street artists and graffiti writers in downtown Los Angeles. There was a rise in awareness of how turning industrial areas into open-air art galleries and tourist attractions had the effect of increased rent, and priced nearby long-term residents out of their communities. As a general trend, a lot of graffiti writers were local to the area where their work could be seen, whereas it was unusual for street artists to be located within the communities where their work was painted.

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