| HS: According to Chaz, Cholo graffiti style goes back to the original Pachuchos after WWII. And before the availability of spray paint most graffiti was done either by brush, shoe shine daubers, or simple sticks and tar from the LA and other river beds and tar pits. This may account for the flourishes in some of the earlier forms. The tools of brush may have leant themselves to imitating brush work they had seen in other calligraphy or I'm think probably pin-striping. Do you have any thoughts about this hypothesis? HG: I've seen very little graffiti that could be dated to the period before spray cans. But the little that I'm aware of consisted of square letters that would indeed be consistent with the use of crude marking tools. It seems that later graffiti writers, working with better tools, embellished and refined these basic forms to produce the free style writing that came along later. "Bird1" appears to have used a "chisel point" marker to produce his masterpiece which, though common with taggers now, was revolutionary at the time. I guess it could be said that he was advancing the art. As for the influence of pin-striping, it seems doubtful. Pin-striping with artistic flourishes started in the mid 1950s with the legendary Von Dutch being the popularly acknowledged originator. | |
