Graffiti at Alcântara | using a Stabilo Woody
Passing through Lisbon, responding with my art making
When you travel from one place to the next, do you consciously think about what attracts your attention? A contrasting point of interest - perhaps a bright red solitary house in the midst of rolling hills, or the blue flash of Magpie feathers as it lands on a branch. I’m sitting on a train, staring out the window, passing endless grey boring buildings, soulless, one after another, nobody around. A graffiti tag. Another scrawl. A bright yellow football shirt flickers in the breeze: a couple of boys playing. They’re quickly gone. Alighting at my destination I walk down the filthy stairs into an underpass, it’s quiet, and threatening. Then, suddenly, a riot of colour.
What energy, what vibrancy and richness: of movement, of action, of things being said. I’m walking in a giant abstract painting - a collaboration of symbols and tags vying for attention. This is what art should do: shift our emotions away from the mundane.
Exiting the underpass, into the bright blue heat. Immediately, I’m awed by the constructed environment. Now I’m under the huge River Tagus suspension bridge. The road and rail platform aligns, for a moment, with a construction crane, vertically and diagonally. The repetition of crosses and triangles create a sense of immense strength, of feats of engineering of the past and the present. The slope to the horizon hints of broader connections beyond my location, a conduit of mass transit.
The underpass wowed me with its vibrant colours, but now the colour of place is incidental to form: experienced powerfully through tonal contrasts.
A little further, I enter Village Underground - a collection of shipping containers stacked one on another, adapted for use as office rental space. A double-decker bus, seemingly perched precariously on a shipping container, appears to be a common room. I bought a coffee. I relaxed.
Onwards to my destination: an old 4 floor factory building divided into atelier studios and offices for all sorts of modern industry. A place where start up software development companies hang-out cheek-and-jowl with financial advisers; graphic design companies next to recycled clothing sellers; painters labour in their studios. And in the public spaces, as with the Alcântara underpass, a seemingly never-ending expanse of graffiti. An atmosphere of edginess, and then, suddenly, a more formal composition: two girls looking at me as I enter a doorway. What are they saying?
What’s your feeling when you pass through spaces with graffiti? Do you think it’s a legitimate form of artistic expression, or a symbol of delinquency and disorder? It’s a complex subject and I offer no discourse on the whys and wherefores. All I know is that I found these spaces exciting and vibrant, a completely different feeling from passing through boring blank walls laced with adverts telling me to subscribe to some super fast broadband plan, or to bank with HSBC, or whatever. Grafitti is a democratic artform.
In response to my day’s travels I made a painting simplifying an idea of the Tagus River Bridge.
A sweep of grey across the page, offering the idea of movement to other destinations; swirls of orange texture: dust and heat; patches of blues and greens: the gentle movement of palm trees; deep black lines: a nod to elements of scribbled graffiti.
I draw those lovely saturated black lines with a Stabilo Woody crayon. It’s my current favourite drawing tool.
If you’re really interested in the Woody then you might like to watch a quick video of me using it on YouTube.
Next time …
I’m back in Sanremo, with lots of photos and sketches and ideas. It’s time to get back to my large canvases for my next series of paintings, and other scribblings …
List of Illustrations
Fig. 1. Bell, D. (2023) Tagus River Bridge Area - Lisbon [acrylic paint and mixed media on paper] 38 x 25 cm.
About me
My name is David Bell and I’m an artist living in Sanremo, Italy. I write this blog for my band of supporters, giving an insight to my art and life generally living on the beautiful Riviera of Flowers.
Ciao4now … alla prossima.
loving your blogs Dave