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From Street Art to Canvas
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For some, the first venture into art was in a classroom. Or, maybe it was at a kitchen table under the encouragement of artistically inclined parents. For artist Jamie O’Neill, the most impactful art lessons began on the streets. When he started out his canvas was not linen, but rather walls, subway cars and tunnels, abandoned automobiles and boxcars.
To understand the work of this artist, you must first look at the outsider art many people label as just graffiti. But the art created “on the streets” has a tight-knit group of supporting artists, rivalries and levels of expertise — just as in “traditional” art culture.
Understanding Street Art
Graffiti can be broken into two genres. The first is street art comprised of stencils, paintings and stickers. The second is lettering, which is also known as graffiti writing.
At one end of the spectrum, lettering may consist of a simple word thrown up with a marker to tag a gang’s territory. At the other end, it is the finely tuned, stylized and distinctive lettering recognizable to all street artists, and which represents the best of the best.
Graffiti lettering has a rich history, recognizable inspirations (period pop-culture personalities, television shows and movies, as examples) and masterful artists held in great esteem by emerging graffiti writers.
Numerous graffiti artists have shifted into the mainstream art world. They are showing their art — now painted on canvas — on gallery walls rather than in the streets. And, university art courses incorporate their works into syllabuses, while books and documentaries set out to explore the meaning behind the art.
O’Neill is one such artist who transitioned to canvas after years creating eye-catching lettering on the streets.
Learning to Write
Riding through Boston in the backseat of his parents’ car, O’Neill’s first graffiti memory is seeing letters written on an old incinerator. “I was just a kid. And so, I was less interested in creating the art and more concerned about what my street name would be,” recalls O’Neill. “Years later at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, I discovered magazines about graffiti. I was amazed that people were creating with spray paint.”
This spray paint art was different from the art O’Neill saw displayed in museums growing up and while studying the works of the Old Masters — which all seemed so unattainable to him. But spray paint? That was something he could do.
“For me, graffiti is an avenue of self-expression, an education in composition and the practice of mastering one’s craft,” he explains.
His infatuation with spray paint art quickly blossomed. He started to copy the masters of this craft in notebooks, writing their works again and again. He even took a class while in college, held off-campus in the city.
This course and the surrounding city was finally the spark to ignite his graffiti art flame. And although he didn’t know a graffiti writer at the time, he would go out at night to letter the streets.
When he did finally meet fellow writers, they weren’t very impressed with O’Neill’s skill. “They said I had heart, but that I was terrible,” he recalls, noting, however, that the other artists were impressed with the places he was painting at.
He continues, “Some of these guys had the artistic skill, had been taught by the greats, but they couldn’t write it up on the wall with spray paint. I could write on the wall but just needed some artistic guidance. So we ended up helping [one another]. We pushed each other with graffiti lettering, and later we transitioned to gallery art, more mainstream art, together.”
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