Street Art

Street art is probably the most accessible art form there is: you need no ticket, no opening hours and no prior knowledge to see it. It simply comes to you — on a house wall, on an electrical box, in an underpass. That is exactly what makes it so exciting and, at the same time, so hard to pin down.

In this article we look at what street art actually is, how it came about, which techniques are used and what to keep in mind if you want to start yourself.

What Is Street Art?

Street art is an umbrella term for art that is made in public space and deliberately addresses everyone who walks past. Unlike a picture in a museum, it does not get to choose its audience.

Three things are characteristic:

• The place is part of the work. A figure stuck to a crumbling wall reads differently than the same figure on paper. Many street artists deliberately work cracks, pipes, shadows or signs into their motif.
• It is temporary. Rain, sun, buffing and demolition are part of the deal. Many works exist today only as a photograph.
• It usually has something to say. Social criticism, politics, humour, or simply a comment on the place itself.

Street Art and Graffiti — What’s the Difference?

The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they don’t quite mean the same thing.

Graffiti traditionally revolves around lettering. The name — the tag — is at the centre, and the question is how artfully, how readably or how intricately you can shape it. The scene has its own rules, its own history and its own code of honour.

Street art is broader. It is about images, figures, stencils, installations and collages — the artist’s name often stays in the background. Put simply: graffiti asks who, street art asks what.

In practice the two worlds overlap, of course, and many artists move in both.

A Short Look at the History

People have been writing on walls for as long as there have been walls — think of cave painting, or of the scribbles preserved in Pompeii. As a movement, though, street art only emerged in the 20th century.

In the 1960s and 1970s the graffiti scene developed in Philadelphia and New York, and its tags soon covered entire subway trains. In parallel, artists in Europe began working with stencils: Blek le Rat sprayed his famous rats in Paris from 1981 onwards and is considered by many to be the father of the stencil technique.

In the 1980s, artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring moved from the street into the galleries — a step that is still discussed controversially today. With Banksy in the 2000s at the latest, street art became a global phenomenon for good, complete with auctions, museums and the irony that art which was supposed to belong to nobody is suddenly worth millions.

Street Art Techniques

Stencil

Work by Banksy in Sanok, Poland – Silar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

With the stencil technique you cut a motif out of cardboard or film and spray paint through it. The big advantage: the motif can be applied in seconds and repeated as often as you like.

To prepare one, you need a motif with clear light and dark areas. If you still find that difficult, the article on light and shadow will help you: a good stencil is essentially nothing more than an image consistently reduced to two tones.

Mural

Murals are large-format wall paintings, usually commissioned and made legally. Here you work with brush, roller or spray can, and often over several days.

The biggest challenge is scale: what looks balanced on the sketch can fall completely apart on a wall ten metres high. That is why it pays to make a clean composition sketch beforehand and to divide the wall into a grid.

Paste-Up

With a paste-up, a motif printed or painted on paper is glued to the wall with wheat paste. It is quick, reversible and allows very fine detail, because you can work on it in peace at home.

Sticker

Stickers are the lowest-threshold entry point of all: small format, quick to apply, easy to spread around. Many artists use them to make a motif or a character known.

Installation and Yarn Bombing

Not everything is paint. Some artists work with objects, knitted wool, mosaic tiles or moss. The French artist Invader, for example, has been placing mosaics in the style of pixel graphics in cities all over the world since the 1990s.

Well-Known Street Artists

• Banksy – probably the best-known representative, and still anonymous. Works almost exclusively with stencils and political irony.
• Jean-Michel Basquiat – started out in New York under the tag SAMO and became one of the most important painters of the 20th century.
• Keith Haring – known for his pared-down, dancing figures, which he first drew in subway stations.
• Blek le Rat – the pioneer of the stencil technique in Europe.
• Shepard Fairey – from skateboard stickers to the Hope poster.
• JR – pastes larger-than-life black-and-white portraits onto façades and walls worldwide.

If these names make you curious, the article on famous artists and the overview of art styles offer further context.

Is Street Art Legal?

This is the question asked most often and answered honestly least often. The short answer: painting a wall that belongs to someone else without permission is a criminal offence — criminal damage under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 in the UK, and vandalism or criminal mischief under state law in the US. It makes no difference how good the result looks or how ugly the wall was beforehand.

Two things people regularly get wrong:

• Stickers and paste-ups count too. In the UK, flyposting is an offence in its own right under section 224 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, with a fine of up to £2,500, and councils issue fixed penalty notices for it. Most US cities have equivalent “posting bills” ordinances. On top of the penalty, the cost of removal is usually charged to you.
• Even a legal mural can need paperwork. The owner’s permission is the first step, not the last one. In Los Angeles, murals on private property have to be registered with the Department of Cultural Affairs — the 2013 mural ordinance lifted an eleven-year ban and replaced it with a registration process, and a building permit is needed on top for tiled or digitally printed works. Many cities run similar schemes, so it is worth asking the local authority as well as the owner.

None of that means you can’t make street art. There are plenty of legal routes:

• Free walls and halls of fame. Many cities provide surfaces that anyone may paint — London’s Leake Street Tunnel under Waterloo Station is the best-known example in the UK. The map at legal-walls.net lists thousands of spots worldwide.
• Your own surfaces. A garage door, a garden wall, a cellar wall, an old sheet of plywood in the yard.
• Commissions. Cafés, clubs, schools and property managers commission murals more often than you would think.
• Canvas and paper. The techniques work on a small scale too, and for practising stencils that is the most sensible way anyway.

When in doubt, simply ask the owner. A friendly proposal with a sketch attached is accepted surprisingly often.

How to Start Yourself

You don’t have to begin with the wall of a building. On the contrary — almost everything that makes street art what it is can be practised on paper first:

1. Develop a motif that is recognisable. A figure, an animal, a symbol. Reduce it until it still works from twenty metres away.
2. Practise reducing to two tones. Take a photo and redraw it using only black and white, no greys. That is the basis of every stencil.
3. Work with the surface. Sketch your motif into a photo of a real wall instead of planning it on white ground.
4. Think about scale. Hold your sketch at arm’s length and squint — can you still make out the motif?
5. Document everything. Street art disappears. The photo is often what remains.

And if you find you would rather draw in the city than spray in it, urban sketching is the more relaxed sister of street art — same motifs, different tools, and definitely legal.