History of most common street movement – graffiti
Graffiti might be one of the most well-known street movements nowadays, and it has become associated with different types of street cultures: skaters, punks, hypebeasts… but it has been most commonly associated with hip hop street culture. However, while all of us know what graffiti is, most of us don’t know exactly what it comprises or how it started, so in this article we want to give you a quick rundown of this street movement that is so “in vogue” right now and has become so famous as to be considered a beautiful, desirable form of art.
Graffiti is usually writings or drawings made in a wall or another surface as a type of artistic expression. While graffiti is usually unauthorized and in public view, it is not necessary for it to be so: there are plenty of areas where the graffiti there has been authorized, and plenty of graffiti artists paint in non-visible places when they are just starting to practice. Graffiti has a very long-standing history before nowadays, when you can easily graffiti fonts download: it has existed since antiquity, and the drawings in caves our ancestors used to do, or the inscriptions in house walls dating from the Roman Era are also considered as graffiti. In some cultures where calligraphy is seen as a form of art, graffiti flourished across the eras but in the Western world there hasn’t been wall inscriptions that have been created to be aesthetically pleasing up until recently, so graffiti used to be not considered a real art form (however that reputation is changing nowadays).
This type of street art can be used by the artist for plenty of different reasons: to create a design that is aesthetically pleasing, for political or humoristic purposes, to signal gang activity or simply for notoriety (when a graffiti artist only signs their name, without going any further). Because of this, graffiti has evolved and branched off into many different art styles too: tagging, the most simple form of graffiti, is usually an artist engraving their name in a very simplistic manner in a wall, while wildstyle is usually very detailed and ornate, full of geometric shapes interlocking with dots or circles and with a lot of colors and sometimes, even different materials (some graffiti artists have begun incorporating stickers or even crochet in their creations).
It can also be done in many different ways and using many different materials: some graffiti artists use spray paint of various types, but some use water or oil-based paint. Some even use big markers, which has given birth to special markers to be used for graffiti. When it comes to the method used, a lot of artists paint “freestyle”, using only their imagination or their hands, but some graffiti artists use stencils, models or even photographies to help with their creations and have a “model” to follow as not to make mistakes.
As mentioned before, graffiti used to be considered not an art form but a form of vandalism and used to be shunned and looked down on when compared against other art forms, but that bad reputation is beginning to change, and it is starting to be considered as a different, alternative art form similar to painting. In fact, there are several graffiti artists like the well known Banksy or Jean-Michel Basquiat that often ironize about the fact that in their beginnings, they used to be considered low-lives and criminals for engaging in this street art form, but nowadays are well known, world-famous artists whose art sells for millions and that people pay to see, and Banksy has made the headlines by destroying the artwork he created and sold at an auctions as a way to protest this irony.
We hope you have enjoyed this article and that you have learned a bit more about graffiti and its origins, its story and how the way it is seen has been changing for the better in the recent times. If you are a fan of graffiti or searching for a beautiful font that would fit your street style project, please do not hesitate to head to fontsly.com to find plenty of graffiti fonts to download!
