Art on the Wall

                      

            Vandalism.  They’re a group of young people that have no respect for anyone else’s belongings. It is an untasteful display of emotion expressed in the wrong way. Graffiti, what is it? Where did it come from and what has it help shape?

            “Graffiti is the name for images or letterings scratched, scrawled, painted, or marked in any manner on property.” (Wikipedia) It can be “dated back to Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.”(Wikipedia) “The earliest forms date back to 30,000 in the form of prehistoric cave paintings and pictographs using tools such as animal bones and pigment.”(Wikipedia) Going from the caves and prehistoric times we can find ourselves in Modern-Style Graffiti.

            Modern Style graffiti’s first known examples can be said to survive “ in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus.” (Wikipedia) Graffiti was found carved onto walls and monuments in ancient Rome In Pompeii, Vesuvius preserved graffiti. This included “Latin curses, magic spells, declarations of Love” (Wikipedia) and many other things that gave insight to Roman street life.

            From the Modern Style graffiti we venture into Modern graffiti. It is here graffiti is “ often seen as having become intertwined with hip hop culture and the myriad of international styles derived for New York Subway graffiti.” (Wikipedia)Graffiti continued to spread with culture and to different lands; letting artist express themselves not only about who they were by tagging their names on walls, but also by allowing them to convey their views on political stand points.

            Yes, people think this kind of art is vandalism, untasteful and done in places where it should not be. Look how far it dates back and what ways its came through time to help shape some of the culture that is still here today. Art is always open to interpretations, so why not make your own opinion? I myself love graffiti and wish there where more places here that allow the artists to fill the streets with what lies inside.

http://animalnewyork.com/2009/06/prehistoric-graffiti-rocks/graffiti-rock-4/

           

Liberty by Banksy

http://www.wired.com/wired/images.html?issue=13.08&topic=bansky&img=6

“Graffiti-Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” Wikipedia site .21 September 2010. 21 September 2010 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti>

The Land of Communication!

                                         http://designobserver.com/images/features/Cover.jpg

           Have your ever wondered what the most basic and earliest form of graphic expression was? Or where early writing originated? How about the alphabet and some of the background behind that?

            Well according to Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish’s book Graphic Design History A Critical Guide, “Mark making is the most basic form of graphic expression and design.”(Pg 11) It is also said “Drawing a line in the sand or making a handprint on a wall is a direct sign of individual identity.” (Pg 11) In the movie 2001 Space Odyssey by Robert Colbert mark making can be seen in the beginning. During the movie there are a group of apes that are seen writing in the sand. It is not sure what it was that they were writing but, I believe that they may have been marking their territory for the fact that when another group of apes approach them they began to scream and bang on the ground.

            So where did this thing called writing originate. “Writing proper evolved in ancient Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE, in the Fertile Crescent that lies between the Trigis and Euphrates River.( Drucker and McVarish, p. 14) Many different writing styles may have evolved from this ancient Mesopotamia writing called cuneiform Script.” (Drucker and McVarish, p 15) Among these styles is “ Egyptian writing in the Indus Valley (present day Pakistan).” (Drucker and McVarish, p 15)

            Lastly, the alphabet, what may have been the first recognizable form of the alphabet and where may that form that we use today originate from? According to AncientScripts.com “the first recognizable form of the alphabet may have came from a particular script called Proto-Sinaitic.” Proto-Sinaitic is a “strange system whose symbols were very similar to Egyptian Hieroglyphs, but recorded a languages related to Phoenician and Hebrew.” Then “the English alphabet of twenty-six letters is derived from the Latin alphabet of twenty-three letters.” (The Origin, 2010) Also some of the letters we use come from both Roman and Greek background, and the “Greek traditions derives the alphabet for the Phoenicians.” (Bruce, 2010)

            So what was the earliest form of graphic expression; mark making. The fact that our alphabet can be traced back in time to more then one different culture is an awesome concept. It is evident that although we as people come from many different ways of life; we have something so simple as our ABC’s in common.

                               http://www.ancientscripts.com/images/alpha-map.gif

Drucker, Johanna and McVarish, Emily. Graphic Design History A Critical Guide. New Jersey: Pearson
        Education, 2009

Black, White, and Colored

                  Saturday mornings, the Sunday paper, the book a little kid hides in his back pocket at recess and stuffs in between the pages of his history book while the teacher is teaching a lesson. A man dressed up in a suit with webs all over it or and man wearing a red cape flying through the sky.  All of these have something in common. All of these things can be related to a little thing called a comic or comic book or even comic strip.

                   In class we watched a clip about comics and their origin as well as where they began. I was slightly interested in the subject, so I went browsing on the net to see what other comics where out there, aside from your normal Superman and Spiderman.  I came across a strip called Mama’s Boyz. In these strips the author takes messages or situations that occur in everyday life and turn them into comics strips.  For example, the first strip talks about a rapper and the message that he sends out to children. His message is to carry guns and take what you want by force. Then by the end of the strip the same message he sends to the children gets the rapper of strip robbed.  The second strip that interested me by Jerry Craft is about teenage pregnancy and how these girls are not old enough to get into a movie because they are under the age of seventeen. In the strip, they are denied access to the movie and was told to bring a parent; so they could enter. The irony of the whole thing is that they are parents themselves.

                   I think that comics are not only a great way to express feeling on how things are, but also great because some of them like Spiderman or Superman, let you venture into a world outside of our own.

                                                             http://mamasboyz.com

                                              http://mamasboyz.com/comics/pregnancy.html