FINDING NEW MOTIFS IS always a painter’s challenge. There’s still life, the sunset, and the portrait in repose, tried and true. The painter takes the ordinary and tries to make it extraordinary. Occasionally, new motifs appear, and two modern cases are graffiti and tattoos.
Both ancient, graffiti has been found on Greco-Roman ruins and tattoos go back to ancient tribal societies. Since the 1980s, these two motifs have had d a dramatic rise and fall. For a time they were new topics for painters.
Given my relatively sheltered life, I knew about tattoos—on sailors and the like. Then I went to an Indian-American traditional wedding. All the women had ornate brown-ink tattoos on their hands, somewhat shockingly. I soon learned this is the “henna” type, which fades over a few weeks: It’s not permanent.
Permanent tattoos have now become commonplaces and in the oddest places. Today, everyone from Hollywood stars to highschoolers seems to get one. Some get entire body parts scripted. The Tattoo "art" industry has taken off. Painters, in pursuit of new motifs, naturally noticed. Before long, it was subject matter for portrait painters. The more handsome or gorgeous the model, the more overwhelming the tattoos, it seems.
In these portraits, there's skill involved, of course. The tattoo must be precisely painted, and it must lay on the skin, adjusting to natural skin tones and values of light and dark. Not my favorite kind of portraits, but often stunning, nevertheless.
Then there's graffiti, a mode of art that took on the American urban scene for a couple decades. Once, I met a woman painter who specialized in "figure and landscape," and, indeed, the landscape was urban graffiti. Matching the different styles of graffiti art was as important as making the human figures look real in their environment.
That trend, too, like portraits of people with tattoos, has peaked and passed. Graffiti itself, however, was an important chapter in art history. Invented in the 1960s, it’s been re-invented a few more times. “Graffiti is the rock and roll of visual art,” says one graffiti artist. Another says it isn’t just writing on the wall: “It is illegal art on a wall.”
Many of us remember living in New York City on the cusp of the 1980s when not a single subway car was spared, inside or out. Most of it was dull black or silver insignia, overlaid ad nauseam. Who can deny, however, the splendors of the high-end “wild style” graffiti? One museum head in Los Angeles put it this way: “Wild style graffiti may be the most influential art movement since pop art.”
Wild style is an articulate abstraction, using letters, arrows, curves, and biomorphic shapes (think surrealism), almost like Celtic lace work. In the old Cubist days this violation of normal space was called “shattering the closed form.” Wild style has excelled all others in its brilliant colors and air-brush modeling. Nevertheless, on the way there we can’t forget the organic tendrils of art nouveau or the glossy hot rod and custom car designs of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.
With graffiti, size matters. Chroniclers agree that its main impulse was to do something big that would be noticed. For these entrepreneurs, the idea of a painting in a gallery was unthinkable. If “style” is loathsome term in modern art, it is everything in graffiti art.
It all began in Philadelphia and then New York City in the 1960s in a practice called “tagging,” or putting your initials on a wall. In the 1970s, Los Angeles had its own “cholo” graffiti (an angular style used by Latino gangs). That decade saw graffiti blossom in diverse forms in many cities. A turning point was New York City’s anti-graffiti campaign in 1989, but already in the early 1980s, graffiti artists had taken their work into upscale New York City galleries.
Soon, we have gallery-oriented graffiti stars, to include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Shepard Fairey, and Banksy, all of whom started as “street artists.” That art movement reached a kind of peroration in Fairey’s “Hope” poster for the 2008 Barrack Obama presidential campaign. The 2010 graffiti documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop” was also nominated for an Academy Award.
Today “illegal” graffiti continues, but it has mostly joined forces with commerce and expanded as a subculture entwined with city skateboarding and hip-hop music. Some of the best-known street artists now take commissions for public murals or show in galleries. Not a few commercial art design firms are now headed by former spray-can bandits.
An art form begun by teens in poor urban neighborhoods, or sailors in the case of tattoos, both are now celebrity art forms. They became motifs for painters, but have now passed into a kind of commonplace. If they are now ordinary, painters can still find ways to make them extraordinary.