odour cologne

I do not wish to imply that the graffiti we saw in Cologne is somehow ‘better’ than what we saw in Brussels, but we did spend four days in Cologne, compared with only one day in the Belgian capital, so this collection is naturally more comprehensive. However, of those four days, two days were spent cruising on the Rhine, and most of a third day was devoted to looking around the cathedral, so it’s possible that there is more graffiti talent in the German city than there is in Brussels.

The first photo, of a wall close to our hotel, is a good example of what I would call the ‘classic’ graffiti style, although there are individual flourishes. This classic style features bulbous, rounded letters:

There is a hint that the white highlighting is intended to represent spermatozoa.

There is a park close to our hotel, and I photographed the next four graffiti on various walls there:

The first of these images, in addition to an unusual lettering style, features two commonly recurring motifs—bubbles and running paint—while the squiggles within the letters could be intended to represent coliform bacteria. The second image includes two separate graffiti. The one on the left relies on colour for its effect, although the artist has added black lines around the edges to enhance the image, while the one on the right, although crude, is stylistically unlike anything else I’ve seen. The yellow circles in the third image may be intended to represent bubbles, but the feature that intrigues me here is the overlapping fourth and fifth letters (all the other letters are clearly separated). The fourth image is an exemplar of what I call ‘space’ style. The jagged lines remind me of comic book art. Zap! Pow!

Are there three graffiti in the next photo, or just two? The green and blue tags on the left of the photo appear to be in the same style, and the green overlaps the blue, so I surmise that both are part of the same graffito:

If my conjecture is correct, then it’s unusual to see this kind of colour change in a single graffito.

The next image is a fairly standard tag, except for the ‘entwined’ style of the first letter:

Is the next image graffiti or street art? I included photos taken to the immediate left and right of this image in Street Art Gallery, and the train passing through this location marks the image as art, but I’ve decided—entirely arbitrarily—to post it as an example of graffiti.

Pink and blue bubbles is what I see in the next photo. I note that it is signed ‘GUYS’, and there is a second graffito, below, that also carries this signature, although the two graffiti are not stylistically similar:

Crude but effective:

The pink and blue of the next graffito resemble the colours in the last but one photo, but again the styles are dissimilar:

Although I can identify the general area where the photos in this collection were taken, I can be specific only about the next five images. The first four are located on the parapet of the Hohenzollern Bridge, which carries the main railway line across the Rhine, at the eastern end:

Note that two of these include the word ‘NICE’ (the example that I used in Continental Excursion, which was also taken here, includes this word too). However, the writing is not stylistically similar, and only in the first of these two examples does the word appear to be part of the design. I wonder if the word has been added by someone else.

The wall space at the eastern end of the bridge is covered with a hodge-podge of graffiti, but I considered that only the next image was worth recording. The sinuous style is most unusual:

I’ve included the next photo to provide a sense of the milieu in which graffiti appear in Cologne. The designs on these shutters are thoroughly nondescript, and the left-hand shutter, in particular, is little short of mindless vandalism. However, this is not located in a rundown area, and the streets are completely free of litter.

Although I like the colours in the next graffito, the point to note here is the letters ‘FYA’, which also appear in the fourth photograph above (the one with the yellow circles):

The next image is quite dark, which is probably the result of using grey as a body colour:

If you look closely at the photograph of a skeleton painted on the gable end of a house in Street Art Gallery, you will see the tag ‘LTN’ near the bottom. This graffito also includes these letters, but the second and third letters are lower case, and the lettering styles are completely different:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get all of the next graffito in a single shot:

What I like about the next design is the bulbous excrescences at the base of the first two letters. They may have been intended as serifs, but to me they look like a pair of hobnailed boots:

Finally, here are two ‘classic’ graffiti that I found close to our hotel:

The evenness of the curves in the left-hand graffito suggest muscular aggression to me, although that may be because I’ve made an unjustified assumption about gang culture in New York, where this type of street art appears to have originated.