Art through the Colors of Graffiti: from the perspective of chromatic structure by Claudia Feitosa-Santana (2)

Abstract:

Graffiti is a general term that describes inscriptions on a wall, a practice with ancient origins, ranging from simple drawings and writings to elaborate pictorial representations. Nowadays, the term graffiti commonly describes the street art dedicated to wall paintings, which raises complex questions, including aesthetic ones. I studied the aesthetics of graffiti colors by quantitatively characterizing and comparing their chromatic structure to that of traditional paintings in museums and natural scenes obtained by hyperspectral imaging. Two hundred twenty-eight photos of graffiti were taken in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. The colors of graffiti were represented in a color space and characterized by several statistical parameters. Graffiti have chromatic structures similar to those of traditional paintings, namely their preferred colors, distribution, and balance. In particular, a tendency for having similar colors in the same proportions. Like more traditional artists, the preferred colors are close to the yellow–blue axis of…