Graffiti

[Frank Cox]

I just discovered a big HGCN with hearts around it scrawled outside on the lobby wall. Growl. Fortunately I have some paint in the same colour as the siding so I just did an unexpected paint job and now it's gone. I don't think it was there long since I took some garbage around there a couple of days ago and I didn't notice anything then.

First time I've ever had graffiti on the outside of this building in the 27 years that I've had it. I've had graffiti on the bathroom stall partitions before ("For a good time call..."), and actually re-painted some of them once just for that reason. But that hasn't been a problem for quite a few years now either.

But still, man that's infuriating! I don't know why people feel the need to deface stuff that way.

Actually, I've seen some graffiti on railroad cars that looks like real art. I remember seeing a woman's face once, and some other designs and drawings that struck me as being genuinely artistic. Most of it's just a scrawl or a smear, of course, but some it has actual merit. I've always wondered why someone with artistic ability like that would be wasting it on railroad cars and not doing something constructive with their talent.

[Kenneth Wuepper]

Around here there are two distinctly different "paintings".

The first are actually territory marking for gangs. These are usually letters or some unique symbols.

The second type is the artistic one. Namely a local artist or team of artists are paid to decorate the side of the building.
This is called "urban walls" in local media reports and there is one very good artist that heads up those paintings.

Some of their work is very good. I could photograph some if anyone is interested.

KEN

[Harold Hallikainen]

A friend has a mural blog here in Tucson. https://tucsonmurals.blogspot.com/ . There's some pretty amazing stuff. And then I photographed a bunch in the River North (Rino) district of Denver. https://kiwi.hallikainen.org/gallery...20/RINO?page=1 .

Some talented people out there. Not graffiti!

[Randy Stankey]

I tried to look up HGCN as a gang tag and didn't find anything on Google.

Anyhow, it's good that you covered it over ASAP. If it is a gang, leaving a tag like that in place usually means that they claim your place as their territory. If the same tag appears in other places near your property, it probably means that somebody or some group of people is up to something no good.

I can't think of anything that "HGCN" might mean either as a gang symbol or as some kind of tag that teenage wankers think it's fashionable to spray.

AFAIAC, there are two kinds of graffiti. There's stuff like Banksy then there's wankers.

Seems, to me, like your graffiti was done by the latter.

[Bobby Henderson]

I like murals if they're well painted. A couple of my co-workers have painted a bunch of them around Lawton. There is a couple of other mural artists in our town. That's at least one positive calling card for this small city.

Most graffiti sucks. Scribbled out tags are either just straight vandalism or calling cards for street gangs. There is nothing "artistic" about that. Some of the graffiti painted on railroad freight cars can be pretty cool looking, but such examples are pretty rare. We're talking maybe 1 out of every 10,000 tagged rail cars. Most of that graffiti is pretty unremarkable, basically copying a style that has been re-hashed for decades. To me, very little of it has changed over the past 40 years. And I've seen a lot of this stuff, either rail-fanning or just from years of riding the subways in New York City. The visual shtick going on with most average rail car graffiti is akin to clip art. It does not qualify as being real art. At best, it would rank as "craft," but most of it is just an eye-sore.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Yeah, it's probably not a Bansky, so you probably didn't destroy a few millions worth of "art" right in the process.

From the oracle known as Google: HGCN: A Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network-Based Deep Learning Model Toward Collective Classification

One heck of a hipster gang that is.

[Randy Stankey]

...Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network...

I found that, too, and thought the same as you.

Maybe there's a rogue gang of techno-geeks running amok in Saskatchewan!

[Mike Blakesley]

Some of the graffiti painted on railroad freight cars can be pretty cool looking, but such examples are pretty rare. We're talking maybe 1 out of every 10,000 tagged rail cars.

Being here in a railroad town and with both of my jobs within spitting distance of the tracks, I see dozens and often hundreds of graffiti'd cars every day. I suppose it's what your definition of "art" is, but quite a bit of that graffiti is done by people who put a serious amount of effort into it. The ones that would classify as "attractive" are indeed pretty rare and the vast majority are just scrawls but I've seen some pretty impressive work, sometimes they cover the whole side of a car. There's one particular car that has the word PEACE in fading rainbow colors covering the whole side of the car that I've seen three or four times. It had to take a long time to do that.

Have always wondered what happens to people who get caught doing railroad graffiti, and how many of the examples we see would actually look better but are unfinished due to the artist being chased off.

I got the letters "GWON" spraypainted on the backside of the theatre building about 10 years ago but I think it was just local pranksters. It's on a bare brick wall that nobody ever sees, and the same thing was sprayed in other random locations all over town (and all on the same weekend) so it's still there today in all its mostly-faded glory.