Grafitti as ART? In your home??

Have you ever been stopped by a train and found yourself amazed by the colorful and sometimes IMPRESSIVE art that is tagged on the railroad cars as they roll past your view?  Sometimes it's like a moving art show.  The colors, designs, alphabets..the way the artist weaves the words into and around each other.  It's actually pretty cool stuff!  When traffic in Chicago is bad...I find myself searching the surrounding neighborhood buildings for grafitti tags.  I enjoy finding the ones that are filled in with color and intricate patterns.  

Recently, I finished a mural in a New Lenox residence.  It was a young man's bedroom where he wanted grafitti art in sports theme to represent his dreams and life.  I thought this was a really cool concept and he and I together searched the web for sports related grafitti.  I had a similar project about 3 years ago for two teen boys and I wanted to show off this new bedroom concept.  Grafitti art is powerful, culturally dynamic, colorful, intricate, current, satyrical.  It's the visual poetry for our times captured in visual metaphor.  

My first grafitti art bedroom project had me paint the walls in metallic silver.  The grafitti art was rendered on top of it only on the prominent wall spaces throughout the room.  This young man selected images from a grafitti reference book and I put it together on a larger scale. 

His brother....not to be undone...also wanted grafitti art in his bedroom but his design took the art to a much more intense level.  His entire bedroom was to be filled with a black and white liquid grafitti style.  The eyes in the art were enhanced with my phosphorescent pigments and would glow in the dark.
Can you imagine going to sleep and being surrounded by hundreds of 'eyes' watching you?

Creating these teen bedroom murals is actually a lot of fun.  The intensity of the images, the engaging phrases.  These are great motivational and positive messages to fill our minds.  We often decorate our rooms with message plaques with positive phrases on them.  Heck, I even have one that I see when I go into my art Studio about character and attitude.  We all need positive reinforcement and sometimes a little satire about life is fun! I enjoy the art of grafitti and always find myself watching the art roll by at a train crossing...a moving art show.