Workshop with Carlos

Workshop with Carlos

Finally we've found the time to publish our article and we're sorry for keeping you waiting until now!
Firstly, in case you're interested in Carlos' work - who is also known as "Kid Crow" - then please visit his website, his blog or his facebook page!
And now let's start!

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Our workshop began on Thursday morning, ten o' clock. We gathered inside our art classroom at school where Carlos first introduced himself and told us a little bit about where he's coming from and what his work mainly comprises. He intended to teach us about different styles, tools and materials.

After that, we started our "street art day" with a dicussion about what is graffiti for you at all?

Everyone of us was given a small name tag and after having introduced ourselves to Carlos we were supposed to explain what the term of "graffiti" actually means to us.

It turned out that we all had various opinions as to what "graffiti" could imply.

Our answers differed from fascinating, unknown and individual to criticsm, diversity, self-expression and illegality. Carlos showed interest in each point of view, here and there explaining a few things he was going to dig into later on.

The first thing he clarified was

the origin of the word "graffiti"

The word "graffiti" itself descends from the italian word "sgraffiare" which translates roughly to "scratching, scribing." The corresponding noun is "sgraffito" and the consequential plural is "sgraffiti." This is also, according to Carlos, one of the most common misunderstandings for people who don't know much about street art or graffiti namely that the word "graffiti" already is the plural form. So there's no such thing as "graffitis", no. Singular form: graffito. Plural form: graffiti. 

Learning never stops.

We then concentrated on

the different kinds of graffiti

The first thing we focused on are the so-called slogan graffiti.

Mostly scruffily made, these politically oriented graffiti can be found on bare stone walls or other abrasive surfaces inside cities. The criticizing logos are mainly supposed to point out the "artist"'s disaffection and resentment. Since defacing wall is not really a process that requires creative thinking or having any kind of arts-interested inspiration, the mere slogan graffiti can't really be seen as "art."

Something one could describe as the opposite of the above is what we were taking a look at next:

Stencils

During the artistic process of coming up with a proper idea, manufacturing the stencil and then bringing the whole thing against the wall, this is where artistical aspects are to the fore. Compared to the slogan graffiti, these things actually mean something. That meaning varies naturally, it can also be a political opinion (just better parceled), a plea to the people or the visualization of hopes and dreams.

All in all, there are of course dozens and dozens of different kinds of graffiti, different techniques and different scenes. We don't want to anticipate too much in terms of that since we will be starting a series of self-written articles about chosen artists and said techniques and scenes. But another thing that has to be mentioned is that both slogan graffiti and stencils are illegal and shall be taken action against.

Up next was a quick side-trip back in history.

The Origin

Carlos took us on a journey back to the 70s, into the streets of New York where the HipHop scene had just found its beginning. Tormented by criminality, the Bronx was hallmarked by empty apartments and gutted buildings. Teenagers didn't have either much futuristic vision nor anything to do throughout the day, so why not just grab a Sharpie and go scribble all over the grey concrete walls?
They didn't just scribble anything.
And for them it wasn't scribbling.

They wrote down their names in combination with their street names because it was their way of leaving their mark.

The probably most famous example: Taki 183. (visit his website here.)

People kept seeing this name written all over the place and eventually a journalist took his chance and began to search for him.

After a long search, an interview was published in the New York Times. This and the fact that the subway cars Taki had scribbled his name on also drove aboveground granted him one thing.

Fame.

However, as in 1989 a new mayor took office, city safety and guard personnel got upgraded, making it impossible for both Taki and all the other young people that had set to copy the famous "artist" to keep doing what they did.

Graffiti slid down into illegality.

Nevertheless, thanks to certain HipHip movies, the phenomenon swapped over to Europe and eventually to Germany where it spread like a wildfire. The first wagon was being spray-painted in Munich, graffiti is criminal offence since 2005. 

We continued our little discussion by talking about lots and lots of other different variations of graffiti (such as murals, installations and adbusting), about the range of artists and their works and about where graffiti is / can be used for good purposes such as commercials and marketing. This is called "Guerilla Marketing", read an interesting article with picturesque examples here. 

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Now followed the actual fun part of the day.

We got to spray our own artwork!

Don't worry, pictures of that very cool afternoon will follow as a separate post!

Before we could start off with our work everyone of us invented their own little signature, an individual, so-called "tag" that we were going to put under our finished artwork. 
We had lots of time to collect ideas and sketch a few of them before we had to decide for one.

Of course Carlos began with explaining how to use the breathing masks and which differences there are between the various kinds of spray cans. He then showed us how we could manage it to form extra thin or extra thick lines, circles and some awesome effects supposed to give that special touch to our drawing.

After a few minutes of trying all this out by ourselves, we could finally start!
Carlos had an incredible range of colors brought with him so we were able to pick out the precise shades we needed for specific parts.
It took us the entire afternoon to finish our piece but Carlos was always there, showing us different tricks to work around the problems we encountered in the process.
You'll see more of this really amazing experience as soon as the pictures are uploaded, they will give you a way better insight on how everything passed off.

After all, we can say that our workshop with Carlos couldn't have been more informative, interesting and jocular. We took home loads of new ideas for our project and we are very grateful that we were allowed to experience such a wonderful day (and skip a whole day of school at that) with a young artist from our region who showed us a bit of his fascinating work.

Keep your eyes open for the next post which will contain many pictures of that great day!

Thanks for reading and we hope you'll stay tuned!