Stratified Concepts - December 2020

This is an ongoing and endless effort to reconcile my traditional street graffiti with the life of such work beyond the streets. Whether in the curated environment of a gallery or the personal and private spaces of the home or office, I’ve always felt that real street graffiti loses a big part of its soul when taken out of the streets.

This series and this piece (the very first of the series) represents the first attempt of my two dimensional efforts to address that issue through a stratified number of processes. I believe those processes breath new life into the work, reviving its soul in both the gallery and home.

To provide the viewer an experience that carries with it more of the visceral weight that painting in the streets evokes. It’s already evolved a bit since this first piece, but this is the first benchmark of process.

The Process

The 'piece' pictured above shows the genesis of the stratified process. First the concept for the 'piece' is sketched, in this case, in pencil. Once the idea is clear, I photograph the sketch and use it as a guide to redraw it as a vector graphic in illustrator, one point at a time, as shown in the middle image above. Crisp, clean vibrant. Beautiful. Truth be told, real graffiti is rarely so sterile and clean. When one paints in the real world, walls have textures, inconsistencies. Different porosities. So regardless of the beauty and crispness, this is still not an accurate representation of reall street graffiti.

So, the next step is to mirror the image and print it using pigments rather than ink. At this point, the crisp digital perfection is printed and once again becomes a real world, tangible item. Although, interestingly enough, a literal reflection of its digital parent. That little tidbit is something for those of high art persuasion to chew on and debate about.

The next step transfers the image onto its final surface.