anika mari

In the time that I’ve been in Mexico, I have realized that there are at least 4 different types of graffiti or wall art in Mexico City: Sanctioned advertisements on rented walls, traditional style graffiti art utilizing color, shading, depth and skill, stencil style graffiti, and regular scribbled tags of symbols that mean something to drug dealers and gangs. I find the different types of graffiti that decorate the city interesting from an artistic perspective, but I understand that a lot of people really detest it because the walls of houses are constantly tagged with the drug-dealer/gang variety of graffiti. In that respect I can understand why most people don’t really take a look at any kind of graffiti, and instead consider it all vandalism, or at least and eyesore.

But for me, I find it interesting. I haven’t spent a lot of time documenting it, but when ever I see it in the city, it does catch my eye, and I give it a moment of my time and attention. This happened one day when I was driving back to the city from Cuernavaca. Traffic was slow because a truck carrying tile had lost it’s load. We crept by a village that had a wall to between it and the highway, presumably to keep down the road noise. Like on many plain surfaces in the city and surrounding pueblos, they don’t stay that way, and this wall was no exception. It was covered with many styles of graffiti. There was one small part of one tag that particularly caught my eye. The shape of it was so organic and somehow sophisticated. Since we were driving slow, I snatched out my sketch book, and started to draw. I came up with a little motif that was totally different from the shape I’d seen that had inspired me, but I kept going with it.

When I got home, I started a series of patterns based on the shape I’d come up with. The first one I completed within a day:

The colors were easy to choose, and I like the combination, but somehow I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the overall result. I was more intrigued by the negative space (the dark blue shapes) than with the green shapes that were intended to be the focal point of the pattern.

I decided to try out a different pattern based on the shape of negative space from the first pattern:

I love the color combination of the Mulberry and Poppy Red Prismacolors. I think this pattern is an example of not knowing when to stop. The blue and the black areas that I filled in are unnecessary and really distract from the bold color combination of the mulberry and poppy red that would really be stunning on its own. I would have been better off leaving the blue and black areas as white space.

Overall I was pretty happy with the result of the last pattern, even if it wasn’t entirely perfect. But the first green and blue pattern I’d completed still bugged me. I wasn’t sure what needed to change, but I had an idea to smooth out the lines, making the shape a bit more simple, so I did this pattern next:

This time I filled in the negative areas with the new simplified motif, making the pattern a little more rapid and repetitive. I was happier with this result, but I still felt like I was missing something. It just kind of gently nagged at me for a few days until one day after my language class. It had be a long class, and I was really tired when I got home. I lay down, fully intending to rest for 20 minutes. My mind was wondering in no particular direction when an idea suddenly popped into my head. What about 8 points in the shape instead of four? I jumped right up, and sketched a bit, quickly working out the new motif. I worked determinedly, but it still took me more than a day to finish this pattern:

I liked the combination of the yellow with the blues, but I wanted to try out a couple of other color combinations, so I switched it up a bit at the bottom of the pattern.  When I was finished, I had the blue stars finished and the negative spaces colored in with yellow, pink and blue, but it still seemed to be missing something.  I added the small dots at the intersections of the lines of the grid paper with a light gray Stabilo pen.  Finally I felt satisfied with the pattern that graffiti had inspired, and so I was free to move onto the next idea if and when it would hit me.