Art Gold Award - Graffiti Street Art Vandalism Study

This was my final piece for my Unit 1 Art Gold Award, which I passed in May 2013.

I will upload the accompanying essay tomorrow, but in summary, my project was trying to blur the lines between what is Graffiti Art, and what is graffiti vandalism. There is no definite line between the two types of Graffiti because of many reasons; Artists such as ROA, Banksy, Stik and C215, who undoubtedly blurred the lines between grafffiti - vandalism and street art because of their application of work with unquestionable artistic and aesthetic value, to a common street wall, the blank wall of a corner shop to be art amongst the people and by the people.

Arguing this, I decided to recreate as best I could, the conditions and textures that are provided by city walls abandoned industrial buildings etc, all across the globe.

To make the canvas as rough but 'textured' as possible (to my imagination), I PVA glued large angular cuts of cardboard boxes with the top layer peeled off to expose the grill - like ridges for an interesting texture.

Once that had dried, I made a mixture of white acrylic paint, PVA glue, whiteing and grit. I took strips of mod rock roughly the same size (but intentionally different shapes and folded in different ways when applied - I didn't want any part to look the same) and folded it onto the canvas in the way I thought worked aesthetically and applied it by working in the mixture with a thick brush. 

I then selected an animal that was my favourite after trials and development - the raven. I had been studying ROA as a focus for my final essay (as well as the other artists mentioned above). ROA does large murals of ferrel animals, usually working with the many facetes and negative spaces of buildings. I found this extremely interesting and decided to bring the theme of dark, ferrel and often dirty animals into my work, experimenting mainly with rats in development before progressing to ravens. I wanted a different application process that provided a style that was fairly unique (or popular with) graffiti art. Stencilling.

I therefore drew two stencils: one the outline of the raven, and the other was the highlights where the light would catch the feathers and sleek body of the animal.

I chose two spray can colours, black for the block shape of the raven, and a dark, muggy grey for the highlights. I applied the stencils and kept them stuck on the canvas by applying a Tac Spray Adhesive - that it very useful for stencilling - to the back of the stencils.

The finished product! Hope you like it. The piece was produced as an accompaniment to the essay, so it was really only created to help illustrate a point rather than demonstrate any artistic skill. But I'm very pleased with it aesthetically too.

This was a very satisfying piece to produce, purely because I made it from scratch, I even made the frame and stretched the canvas onto it myself which I'd never done or even seen before. All the processes I used I had never done before so it was a great educational project, in terms of both art appreciation and practical skills. I highly recommend anyone interested to give this a go.