Here are some found examples of local graffiti art. Like all art, graffiti can be good art or simply an eye-sore. I try and photograph the good stuff -but maybe the quality of it is purely subjective... at the very least, some of it remains interesting...
Here are a few more examples of Huntington Beach street art, perhaps done from stencils..
Huntington Beach , being the surfer capital of the U.S.A., is the first stop on the culture vulture blog. This is the city I have lived in for forty years. I arrived, in the summer of love, May 1967, and at nine years of age I was quite an impressionable young lad. At that time, Downtown Huntington was considerably smaller than it is today. Really just a modest surfer town with lots of hippies hanging around -and down the road (Pacific Coast Highway) lots of oil wells pumping away...the oil wells and the hippies are somewhat retired now, but the surfers are still there in full force!
Back in those days, the center attraction in downtown HB was the much venerated nightclub The Golden Bear where everyone from BB King, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane to comedians like Steve Martin and Robin Williams appeared. For a big listing of all the great entertainment that dropped in over the years, check out http://www.stockteam.com/hbpix18.html There was usually a line around the block in it's heyday, and hey, were those ever the days! It was a lot less crowded and there was a lot more going on back then... I always regretted I didn't visit the Golden Bear more often but as the saying goes, 'you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone!'. The last time I went, I saw 12-string guitar legend Leo Kottke perform in the early eighties. His guitar playing was (and is still) nothing short of mind-boggling. He's funny too..
Unlike the other kids in the neighborhood, when summertime came around, I had to go work at my dad's printing factory. It was a drag to have to spend the summer racking for silk-screen printers, not to mention waking up at 4:30 am, commuting 25 miles every morning, being the first to arrive and the last to leave at around 6:00 pm. But those are the hours you have to keep if you run your own business. By the time we got home from a coffee-shop dinner, it would be 8:00 in the evening. A smidgeon of TV, then off to bed and then go through the whole ordeal the next day! Three dreadful months every year...sorry, I know I'm venting, but you only get one childhood, and summertime is supposed to be a school kid's favorite season!
In some ways it really was kind of interesting. I'd chat with the printers as we worked together. One guy used to tell me stories about how, back in his home in Hungary, his dog would save him from certain death on more than one ocassion. Once it was when his faithful dog pulled him out of a freezing lake after he had fallen through the thin ice! Another time his dog woke his family up just as a fire was starting up in the house! And another time- well, you get the idea..( I think he was watching to many episodes of Lassie myself). But it helped pass the day..really most of the employees were nice. Maybe because I was the boss's kid, but I think they felt a little sorry for me. In the hot afternoons, the workers would slow down a bit but then suddenly perk up! It was then that my dad would appear 'making the rounds'. A good business owner keeps a steady eye on the business at hand and my dad was right there!
Growing up in a printing factory also made me fascinated with machinery. All kinds of printing presses were churning, clanging and schreeching all day. It seemed I was always walking past them through the course of the day. Letterpresses used for die-cutting, multi-color letterpresses, some 50 feet long. Offset and flexo presses whirrling away... I loved watching the gears and machine parts in motion. Such beautiful precision! Each press had it's own rythym and timing. Unfortunately, I was never any good at mechanics. I just loved watching those machines go. My older brother was the mechanical genius. I remember on one ocassion he was running three presses at once! He could usually fix them too. They tried putting me on one of the smaller offset presses one day (I think I was 12 or so) and geez, did I make a mess of it! It was like that episode of Lucy in a candy factory...so after that, they tried me in the art and photo departments. I worked out a little better there. Here, we did the pre-press art and photo-plates. I learned to make mechanical drawings from blue-prints and also how to make visual sense of scrawls made by the salesmen to indicate what was supposed to be a label design..I worked along side crazy John, who was a great commercial-industrial artist. He taught me everything about making pre-press mechanical art using T- squares, triangles, protractors, french-curves, proportional wheels, etc.. He was funny... -Suddenly, in the middle of the day, he would burst out singing some old loungy song. Other times, he would see one of the office girls coming -he would hide around a corner and just as they came by he would leap out with his arms up in the air, growling like a monster! They'd be scared to death, and he would just laugh and laugh! (so would I!) It was good fun...-Hey, you've got to have some fun during the course of an otherwise dull-day! But the real funny thing is that everthing I learned there as a kid has been rendered obsolete by computer graphics! I've since learned computer graphics by the way..
All of this helped point me in the direction of art, both commercial art and fine art. Really, a fascination with an image, be it graphic or painterly. And having worked in a printing factory that manufactures labels, specifically, I'm always drawn to any bumper-sticker or label stuck anywhere. (One of the labels we printed for aerospace was for the Apollo 11 moon mission. It's stuck on some landing probe part that was left behind on the first moon landing! So, we've even got one of our labels up on the moon!). But back to Earth here in Huntington Beach, there are labels stuck everywhere. I don't know who prints them or where they come from but I see them all over downtown Huntington Beach especially. Labels like these:
These aren't anything like the labels we printed when I was a kid, but they're an example of the current street culture here in Huntington Beach California..
