Although Cologne was the principal destination of our recent continental excursion, our journey there took us through Brussels, where we changed trains. It seemed like a good idea to stop off for a day and take a look around. I’ve already posted examples of street art that I photographed in the Belgian capital, and this post features the best examples of graffiti that I saw during our brief visit.
The first graffito is an apparently simple example of ‘block lettering’:
The next photo is an example of how, in Brussels in particular, more than one graffito may occupy the same vertical space:
…while this is a more ‘arty’ graffito:
The next graffito reminds me of the characters in the ‘Spy vs. Spy’ strip in Mad magazine:
I’m not sure whether the next photo includes an advert for Levi jeans, or whether the word ‘LEViS’ is itself a graffito:
The next graffito is geometric in style (this is another example of sharing the vertical space):
The next image is my favourite in this collection:
…while this is a photo of two similar but separate graffiti, presumably executed by different artists, on the walls of a skateboard park:
I don’t know what the story is here, but I noticed several large vans with graffiti painted on their sides in Brussels. Did the owners/drivers give permission for their vans to be thus decorated? The nearer of the two vans appears to carry the names of an entire crew, and I wonder if this is the vehicle they use to transport equipment and look for walls to paint:
Finally, the wall to the left in the previous photo, obscured by trees, is absolutely covered in graffiti. Because of the trees, it was impossible to get good photographs of individual graffiti, but this photo does provide a general flavour of this location:
This art form has clearly come a long way over the years. It's nice that street "artists" have a place to show off their work. Some is art, some is creative graffiti, and some is just a vandal with a can of spray paint trying to ruin the good stuff. Are their also murals there?
ReplyDeleteHi Pat. I think you’ll agree that some of this stuff deserves a wider audience. At the very least, it can provoke a discussion about what art is.
DeleteOh yeah! I think it does deserve to be seen.
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