Tag Archives: graffiti

Graffiti Artwork in Progress in Venice

On Tuesday, we spied this beautiful work-in-progress graffiti art on the side of the Davy Jones Liquor Locker, a famously no-frills liquor store in Venice, Los Angeles. We’ll go back to see the completed work in a few days and post pix here, but judging from what we see, there’s a local beach theme with palm trees and summery, sunny colors on the “wild style” lettering. Even in its half-finished state, the artwork is beautiful. This spot has been a canvas for a lot of other commisioned graffit art and street art over the years.

“Cold Open”

This beautiful old-school graffiti art is on a corrugated metal fence next to the Venice Beach offices of an advertising agency called Cold Open. Check out this short time-lapse video documenting the painting of this graffiti artwork.

Freight Train Graffiti Art

We were driving through Leucadia, California recently on a weekend surf trip when this freight train decorated with lots of graffiti rolled by. Nearly every car in this train had either massive artwork like in the above photo or colorful graffiti tags painted on it. Where and when this graffiti was painted is anybody’s guess, but it wasn’t in Encinitas. The train brings the artwork to audiences far away from where it was painted. It’s an example of what outer-borough subway graffiti writers back in 1970s New York City used to refer to as “getting up and getting out.”

Cute Monster Stencil Street Art … Atwater Village, Los Angeles

Atwater Village in Los Angeles is where we found this stencil street art of a cute Sesame Street muppets-like monster on the sidewalk. (If you’re looking for it, it’s in front of Kaldi Coffee on Glendale Blvd.) There’s not a lot of this type of street art in Atwater, but it’s not much of a surprise to find it here either.

Atwater is a relaxed neighborhood tucked on a plain across the L.A. river north of and directly adjacent to the small mountainous areas of Silver Lake and Echo Park, L.A.’s long-established two-name combo of gentrified hipsterland. These two hoods feel very much a part of the city and have layers of grit and patination suggesting the edgy character of their pre-gentrification past. Atwater, on the other hand, only a couple of minutes drive away, feels like a quiet residential suburb a world away and is largely devoid of central L.A.’s gritty tinctures.  

Yet it has captured the hipster overspill of cool restaurants and foodie haunts, third-wave espresso bars, indie book and record stores, vintage clothing shops and yoga studios that have signified the gentrification process in the Silver Lake and Echo Park for the past 10-15 years. With has come art and street art.

That said, there’s some hipster cultural heritage in Atwater. In the 1990s, the Beastie Boys ran their mini music and Grand Royal magazine empire from offices and studios on Glendale Blvd., Atwater’s main drag. They recorded their seminal sample-heavy album “Paul’s Boutique” there, too. Atwater is also home to what some consider to be among the finest tacos in Los Angeles. For a segment a few years ago on his TV series “The Layover,” Anthony Bourdain stopped by Tacos Villa Corona, a microscopic hole-in-the-wall Mexican food joint that the Beasties used to frequent.

Graffiti Art … Mission District, San Francisco

This large, energetic graffiti tag art is in the alley behind an old clapboard-style commercial building off Valencia Street in San Francisco’s MissionDistrict. The alley runs for many blocks and is a long, virtual canvas and gallery of street art and graffiti art.