Duro One

Perspective / Lines

Harlem

totem pole

Meanwhile, back in Soho....

Tunnel

Lafayette Station, C Line

Looking down into the tunnel

JOS

Fulton Street Station (G Line), Brooklyn

Smoke

Bar, Chinatown

SoHo Pik

An old one from winter. Soho.

Revised

Don Hills

Spring and Hudson, Soho

It was late on a Saturday night, and Viola and I were leaving Don Hills - a long running venue in the hinterland of Soho. It had been raining hard all night, and the ground, cars and walls of Soho were freshly scrubbed clean for another Sunday morning. We came across this car lot playground, and stopped to take in the view.

The white perimeter on the two walls that form the square of this parking lot are a chalk board begging for spray paint. The material here looks as though it was quickly applied, without having been worked over too much (if at all in some cases). There's a relaxed and warm feel about the stuff here that I really like. I now share it with you.

Psychadelic

3rd Avenue, 4th Street, East Village

This one is important. The coloring scheme is magnificent: purple, yellow and black. the poster is purple, with a light blue to orange-pinky sunset background displayed behind the envisioned apartment block. You can even see that the poster has begun to peel in the top right corner, only to reveal another, lighter purple. The apartments are silvery and nicely add another layer for the tags placed over them.

Over this, there's some silver texta work presumably all by the same writer; and some gold texta work running down the right-hand side. The central motif however is the black swirl. It really is quite beautiful, and its confident trippy swirl harmonises the rich and psychedelic colors around it. This black tag serves as central and strong element to bring all the other disparate elements together. And the yellow paint over it just adds morecolor and movement.

The layering of these texts allows us to see the chronology (the time-line or Tag-Line) that these layers emerged. First there was the silver; then the gold (vying for limited space); then the sprayed black tag; and finally the yellow. The actual time that passed between each of them is harder to trace. But together these levels of color and text has a cumulative effect of psychedelic layers, and competitive harmony.