Street Art

Wall Murals	Commercial	Tools	Voice	Contribution

Established in the 1940s as a “transitional housing community,” the Toronto, Ontario projects known as REGENT PARK is running there Luminato Streetscape Project, and someone had approached me the other day and asked me if I had the chance to go look at the wall murals that had been put up on tour in the neighborhood. Mind you I was already aware of the murals because I drove past the neighborhood everyday, and could see these large pieces on the wall, the tour wasn't’t expensive and I knew I had only a short time to see them because of the demolishing of Regent Park.

Commercial Reality

After I looked at these wall murals I thought to myself why now? Why are they giving us tours, charging us money to see this? If I have questions I look for them in books so I head to my local book store and I ask the retail guy do you have books on wall murals? He tells me yea its in the graffiti Art section. I go through them one after the other “learn to be a graffiti artist” or “graffiti art around the world” and so many other titles and it finally dawns on me that Graffiti has gone commercial now.

Trade Tools

Quickly I drive around Toronto and my eyes widen and mouth droped I see everything from commercial properties to residentials alike all covered with graffiti wall murals, all done with as little as paint. Most of these murals are done by hand or with a painting tool called an airbrush, the paint medium of choice has always been acrillics.

Global Voice

Let me remind you wall murals have a long tradition dating back to the caveman period, when there were no forms of verbal communication they would paint on walls what they had seen in the world. After this the Egyptians embraced the art form painting hieroglyphs on the pyramid walls of there discovery’s found in the world, as did later in Europe the renaissance period perfected by painters such as Michael Angelo and Leonardo divinci and Raphael commissioned to paint religious icons on the walls of the churches. Later on in history it reappeared back in the United States seen mostly in the projects areas of low income housing and after a while was considered “vandalism” a crime and punishable with jail time. Today wall murals is an art form that has a long history paved with hardship and fighting for it’s place through out history amongst our society looking for recognition by speaking in one language to be understood by all.

My Contribution

Since we are the subject of wall murals it only felt right to add a photo of my wall mural that I had done last year, my contribution to the art form was one of my first and longest projects so far. This wall mural is my first attempt to paint anything, I was still in college learning to paint and studying subjects like art history, so by the time class had been finished I was inspired to the point that I felt the need to paint on something so I went after the first wall I could get my hands on. Now this painting is done with acrylics and I also used glow in the dark paint so that when the lights were turned off there would be parts of the image that would be seen like the stars and moon in the background. I’m really surprised by the impact its made on people who have seen it, the feedback has been positive and I get a lot of complements and even photos taken of the work so I’m happy that people really have enjoyed looking at it.