Green Graffiti

Kids love writing on stuff. Crayola disasters on walls, spilling paint all over the place. And some kids just never lose that urge to vandalize walls. this is the origin of graffiti in my opinion. People who feel the urge to spread their creativity on public walls and places. And the authorities don’t agree most of the time. Some people found a unique way to bypass the law by still spreading their creativity. They call it Reverse Graffiti. The most basic example being writing ” wash me” on a dirty car with your finger.

Moose, A pioneer of the technique, hard at work

Nowadays people take the practice to a new level, covering entire walls of tunnels in graffiti that they make only by washing the grime and gunk off the walls.

For Example in this picture we see Moose, one of the style’s pioneers cleans the wall of a tunnel with nothing but a shoebrush and a bucket of water, and a lot of elbow grease and sweat. He’s even been hired by companies such as Smirnoff and Microsoft for advertising jobs , so in a way it’s advertising that’s not harmful to the environment, it grabs the attention of people because it’s unorthodox and it opens a window of opportunity for street artists. The fun comes when we look at this method at a legal point of view. The government doesn’t seem to like it at all. But it’s not really vandalism if you look at it at the right angle. There is no paint on the wall, the wall is in the exact same condition as it was originally but they can’t really pin anything on the “artists” responsible for the works, so they just wash the walls that they work on completely. It’s rather ironic, they somehow coax the authorities to clean up the environment by twisting the law in their favor.

A more complex example of reverse graffiti

technique has already been adopted by many artists, some making portraits, some landscapes. Paul Curtis AKA: Moose, whose work is seen above, has created a large mural in San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel. A tunnel that see’s about 20,000 cars every day, which makes it get covered in dirt, soot from exhaust fumes and old graffiti paint patches.

With the help of Greenworks and their eco-friendly cleaning products, a high pressure water hose and a lot of patience they made a mural of what they thought San Francisco looked like some five hundred years ago. This was part of a project ” The Reverse Graffiti Project” It was documented by filmmaker Doug Pray.