by Kate Flaxx

Created on: June 26, 2010

You make your way to the bus stop one day and see the 'wet paint' sign on the seat so you stand, there’s around a 20 minute wait, so you don't have to stand that long. 

On the other side of the bust stop, there’s a man wearing white overalls.  He has a paint roller in one hand, paint on his clothes and on his face and even a little on his shoes.  It doesn't take long to figure out that he's probably been there for over an hour painting the whole bus stop because of all the graffiti.

The paint guy continues to paint.  What colour is the local council paying this guy to paint the bus stop?  You guessed it, a very pristine and clean white; a perfect canvas.  I knew I’d have my coloured bus stop back the next day

The day before this bus stop was like sitting in a rainbow with all the pinks, reds, oranges, greens, blues, and blacks.  There used to be a little profanity but nothing that offensive and there were plenty of tags to try and decipher and try to memorise so you can identify them if you see them again.

This happened a long time ago, now local councils are permitting local schools graffiti on certain walls in the community.  In some communities that build skate parks, the kids who use these are aloud free expression to graffiti on the skate parks themselves.

We can see graffiti everywhere; on city buildings, light poles, neighbourhood fences, the pavement, in car parks, public toilet buildings, on street signs……It's everywhere.  Most of this graffiti is small, done with permanent marker or tiny amounts of spray paint and sometimes you can tell that this was done in a matter of seconds, not really something you could call art.

It’s the other graffiti, the stuff that looks like it took hours to complete, those artists that have used a spray can in every single way possible.  The thin lines, the bold lines and they're perfectly symmetrical, perfectly straight.  Up close they just look like large blotches of colour but if you stand back and look at the whole picture, they can be large words or statements or even stories.  You can look at some of these and find something new or a new detail every time you look away and look back.

Then there are the Tag artists, not the ones that scribble their tag in permanent marker, but the tags that have the same boldness, perfect lines and the clear statement that they took time to create.  It's these tags that are recognisable and if you go to certain places and see the same ones, you know that the artist has put the same amount of effort and time into their creation.

Although graffiti is seen as defacing property, either public or personal, it takes planning, thought and a really high level of creativity to come up with the drawings, tags and murals these artists come up with and you can’t refer to someone being a graffiti artist and then say that it’s not an art.

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