Beneath the Buff

Discipline is a narrow road. It’s tricky, but you can navigate it. Recklessness is a tightrope. Lose your balance and it’s a long way down. Reckless application of certain disciplines offers the world a taste of what true freedom looks like. Graffiti art is poised between the discipline and recklessness, a tightrope suspended high above a narrow road. Design principles apply. Proportionality, color theory, the use of serif and sans serif typography, balance, counterbalance, activation of space, and line are as important in graffiti art as they are in design. I engage in both practices. The one influences the other and vice versa. Beating the buff and remaining on the wall is the utmost triumph for a graffiti artist. Mostly, however, graffiti art disappears beneath the buff. Commuting in a city like Chicago is an urban experience in its purest form. Gazing out the window a cinematic narrative unfolds; free-form, gritty, stop-frame loco-motion. Beneath the Buff tells a similar tale but adjusts the lens, focusing on the undermined realities of the city’s South Side, the seen beneath the scene, routinely buffed away.