As anyone who likes to view graffiti as a past time or write graffiti themselves will tell you, getting to the site is almost always a bitch. Whether it be a fenced-in train yard or the roof of a building, the best spots are often the least accessible. If that spot happens to be at the bottom of thirty feet of jagged rock and thorny vines, it might also not be the best idea to try getting down there with a couple hundred dollars of fragile camera equipment on your back if it's a slick, wet, rainy day. The shit I go through for you guys...
Cuts and bruises aside, these photos from under a bridge in Southside Richmond came out surprisingly well for how little sunlight I was working with today. The picture you see above is the beginning of a leapfrog piece that spans the entire wall, but the pictures I got don't do it justice so I'll have to get more some other time.
On the direct other side of the wall, across a pretty sizable creek, you'll find three gorgeous pieces in a sort of side-by-side gallery set up.
The left-most piece of the wall is an Elk wildstyle. The colors used provide a contrast that makes the image jump out at you, even in dim light. Also adding to the animated effect is the seemingly organic feel of the piece. Anyone remember what the inside of cellular mitochondria look like from biology? Though I definitely like this piece, it's a little too experimental for my taste. You almost can't make out the lettering in the art. In my humble opinion, you can only get so creative before you lose touch with your artistic identity in a piece if you're a graf writer.
Lucky for us, Elk also did the piece directly adjacent, and this time you can make out who was responsible. Here we see another wildstyle, my favorite of the two, but with a completely different feel. For me, it seems kind of extraterrestrial in theme. The excess of shadow in contrast with the outline glow gives an unnatural aura to the piece while the little nodules give it, as Elk seems to love, an organic presence. Unnatural, but living. Like an alien. Also, just to the right is a cigarette character by Diet One, as one of my graffiti-writing friends informed me.
The last piece on the wall was unfamiliar to me and had been added since I'd last been to this site. Where a Roy piece used to be is now a mural of a camel's skeleton imposed on a geometric background with some floating directional keys. As my writer friend also informed me, this was the work of Mania One. As you'll notice, Mania managed to work around Diet's cigarette character, preserving some of the preceding art. Good looking out. Personally, I really like this piece. The camel, for anyone who knows the history, is a sort of unofficial mascot for the "tobacco capital of America." From the Carolina Tobacco Building to the Tobacco Company club in Shockoe to the headquarters of Philip Morris and Camel, it's in Richmond's heritage. We even have a bar/lounge on Broad called The Camel (check it out, good music). Besides that, it's just an interesting depiction, being skinless and all. The background was also obviously given much attention in this piece as well, being perfectly patterned and ornately detailed. Too few artists pay attention to the possibilities of the background of a work.
