graffeetee – traveling graffiti / graphic / design /art


design journey – beginning…
May 1, 2008, 3:09 pm
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This isn’t about graffiti per se, perhaps.  But rather, this is inspired by its spirit and the elaborate, spontaneous, ubiquitous, free, expressive, and creative art form. Pattern, motif and graphics are elements and ways for expressing yourself. In New York, artists and designers like to use t-shirt as expressive form like the graffiti.

Keith Haring, a well-known graffiti artist (the king of New York graffiti), who among many, successfully bring the Pop Art and graffiti artistic movement to the mainstream and commercialization realm. In the 1980s, Keith Haring, opened his first Pop Shop, a store that offered everyone access to his works – which until then could only be found spray-painted on city walls. Now even art had become democratized through the T-shirt (tee). Pop Shop offered bags and t-shirts, where you could not only appreciate but purchase his works too – including the famous crawling baby. Haring explained that, “The Pop Shop makes my work accessible. It’s about participation on a big level, the point was that we didn’t want to produce things that would cheapen the art. In other words, this was still art as statement”

By making Pop Art an outrider of mass production, Andy Warhol’s silkscreened portraits gave the T-shirt free rein.

For some graffiti artists (“writer”), painting away from the street environment is not graffiti, because it’s distanced from the “underground” and closer to accepted art. T-shirts had more vitality than posters, cardboard, or paper and thus came across as the natural medium for getting their works out to the turned-on throng. For the T-shirt is something that offers freedom by flowing with the body’s movements rather than restricting and confining them. It could be thought of as “traveling graffiti” (graffeetee.co.cc) for it’s a blank canvas, wall, and surface.

 

 

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