On a railroad siding just north of Gazelle, California (a hamlet northwest of Weed and Mount Shasta). Interesting combination of amateur and expert spraypaint use; and if you click on the image, check out the face at the bottom center of the display; I assume it was stenciled, but it’s a pretty nice rendering, at least from a distance.
Technorati Tags: california, interstate 5, travel
This is a god one. Clearly this train has been worked over a few times by different taggers. If you look closely, you can see that the railroad guys have spray painted the car number over the graffiti. Lazy bums….paint the whole car! In any case, the good stuff here is on the lower left. That stuff is all free-hand. They sketch it out on paper first and are excellent at translating it free-hand onto the car. The rest of the stuff here is run-of-the-mill vandalism. And, as you said, that face is probably some sort of screen or stencil. I saw all of this I ever care to see on the subway in the eighties and nineties. It just got old. NYC has gotten very efficient at graffiti abatement. These days, the painted stuff never lasts more than a couple of hours.
Yeah, I’ve thought about how all this stuff was praised as art by the liberal social critics in the ’70s — I remember some big magazine did a big color spread on New York City subway trains that had been tagged while sitting idle at the end of the line — then came to be a big, tiresome nuisance. These days out here, the canvases of choice are parked freight trains, like this one — undoubtedly tagged when it was on a siding in some city — or walls facing on to railroad rights of way. When you take the train down to Oakland from Sacramento, there are miles of walls that have been painted. As you say, some of the stuff is pretty good, too.
We get very little graffiti here in Springfield. Most of it – on train underpasses and bridges – gets painted over by the train company (Union Pacific) within a couple days. Interesting that they remove it from the structures, but leave it on the cars.
I doubt it’s possible the stinky stew car has been around this way, but that blue lettering on the left sure looks familiar (both the color and the lettering).
The Greater New Orleans area has several large painted murals in the traditional places graffiti artists favor. I suppose they are combating the practice by beating them to it. It seems to be working. Graffiti is on the decline here. That or the artists are still displaced by Katrina.
I am particularly interested in the tagger called “Stinky Stew”. I have seen dozens of rail cars with his tag in different forms like, “Stinky Stew”, “Stinky”, “Stink”
and more recently, “Stinkly and Lilly” or “Stinky and Lil”. Anyone photograph any of these?
We saw the Stinky Stew car today in Anderson
It is my 8 year gold’s favorite car & we thought we’d try and track it online. Glad you posted about it!
Weed can provide for some people some kind of relaxation after a hard week of work, many use it for fun, those are call “everyday smokers”. I don’t see no wrong on people smoking weed, as long they behave and don’t begin to do stupid things.