Graffiti Art

Richard Mirando, a.k.a. Seen, is known as the Godfather of Graffiti. His paintings are all over New York subway cars and walls. Graffiti is usually thought of as a bad thing. It is closely related with gangs and they “tag there territory with graffiti. However, Seen has used his artistic abilities to show that graffiti can also be a great art form. An important concept in design is that you want it to be eye catching, and with Seen the mere fact that he uses subway cars and whole walls as his canvases allows his designs to really attract attention. He also uses many other techniques in order to transform generally frowned upon graffiti into art.

First off, his use of color schemes is very good. The colors he uses sometimes tend to be bright which is good because it stands out, but even when he uses dark colors he throws bright colors around it to help highlight the dark colors. This helps the dark colors stand out just as much as the bright colors. Another thing he does really well is using both images and text in his designs. For a lot of the subway cars the words used in the paintings is often the title of the given piece of work. The words are always big, usually three dimensional, and in the center of the artwork. A lot of times, being that it is graffiti sometimes the whole design is just his or someone else’s name in an obscure manner. Either way he always makes sure that the words fit in with the painting, which helps unite the whole design. Although it is very difficult to make out the words in some of his designs, those paintings are almost more attractive than the others just because you get sucked in trying to figure out what is going on in the design.

In all of the designs I have viewed, Seen always makes sure that the painting is balanced. The text is always centered, and he does a good job of keeping the symmetry of his designs; making sure that there is just as much stuff on the right side of the text as there is on the left side. This sense of balance gives rise to a chaos vs. order theme to his paintings. The designs are usually pretty chaotic, but because of this balance you can see that there is still order within the piece. I believe this is what makes his designs so appealing. Without this order I think that it would be quite difficult to look at his designs. Overall I think Seen does a great job at attracting viewers, and his designs are really fun to look at.

~ by jdoughn2 on December 4, 2008.