I’m not doing much.

I have an Acrylic On Canvas I want to get framed. I have not painted it yet but I know it needs to get framed. It will be a recreation of the painting described in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, of the painting of the actual Dawn Treader. I hope that sentence made sense.

I’ve been thinking about graffiti more and more. About the concept at least. Going out, and, in the defiance of rules, creating art.

Anywhere a concrete structure is, it’s part of it’s environment. So, when a graffiti artist sprays a stencil or draws on concrete of=r any structure they are not simply adding art to something pre-existing. It’s not like hanging a canvas on the wall. The canvas can be moved, picked up. The canvas is it’s own object. Separate from the other. The canvas is unrelated to the wall.

But it’s different when a graffiti artist bombs a wall. Here the word bomb means “the act of writing a grafitti tag in a highly visible public place.” (urbandictionary.com). They are not just putting something onto something else, they are changing the object in question.

They create transformative art rather than additive (yes, here the word “create” can be argued against, as one does not (usually) build the structure one bombs). This is pro-active rather than passive and therefor a logical artistic extension of the city-dwelling attitute.

There is something else. If art is about saying something, then the real primal human beauty of graffiti is in it’s recklessness, because the artist has something to say and he or she refuses to acknowledge society’s laws and taboos. They want people to see and to read and too know. And this is, if nothing else in the world is, art.

I’m not comparing graffiti to any other art; and I’m am definitely not saying that it is more noble, or more true, or that one is better than another.

I’m merely choosing to celebrate this reckless abandonment and brutal public exposition. I want to learn from it. I want my own art to be more active, more forceful, more like whatever essence of harsh, messy expression that graffiti artists seem to possess.

In reality, all of the arts are vital; theater, dance, film, literature, poetry, doodling on napkins, oil painting, drip painting, finger painting, screen printing, LED tagging, tatoos and a trillion other things.

Little bits of human souls and feelings locked in images. It’s pretty and it says things and all that. But,in the end, it’s the only way we can really show ourselves to others.

“I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.“

Walt Whitman

from Song of Myself