In Bloom

Finally in bloom, this is a rare, white Tennessee Wisteria plant. Rather than the normal light purple flowers regularly found wild all around the South, the flower is a soft white and spectacularly fragrant. Scratch the picture to sniff (just kidding - please don't try that).

Divine Defacement

Graffiti Follow Up - In our last post, we lamented over the fact that our house got tagged. Since graffiti is a bit of a "problem" in the downtown area, we got over the feeling of being violated pretty quickly, painted over the billboard-like atrocity and now can only hope it doesn't happen again. And, so far, so good. The corner of our old Charleston single house has not been treated as a canvas for the vandal's spray can again to date.

Since we are so often exposed to the creative will and talent of our fellow city-dwellers, and with a bit of a sense of humour, we compared the random defacement of our property to a PROPER graffiti campaign, noting our appreciation for urban arts that transcend simple 'hood rivalry.

Perhaps we just identify with one graffiti style over another. Or, maybe graffiti is just cooler when it's not located on the side of ones own house! At any rate, a walk down King Street today provided another opportunity to appreciate the urban arts. We discovered a few new introspective messages left behind by the brainy bandits pushing the 1.618 graffiti campaign. For those of you unfamiliar with Charleston, King Street is an internationally known shopping district. In other words, the campaign's not-so-subtle hints against consumerism have been strategically placed.The 1.618 graffiti campaign, like all other graffiti, will eventually be cleaned up with taxpayer money. But at the very least, it is smart, modest in size and continues to beg the mysterious question, "what is 1.618?"

To learn more about the meaning of 1.618, scroll down and read our previous post. Or you can click here. Additionally, if you have any insight into the 1.618 campaign, we'd love to hear from you as we remain captivated by these marks of enlightenment showing up all over our fair city.

Divinity in Charleston

The famous and historic city of Charleston, South Carolina is known for many things, but is not typically recognized for its role in the urban art movement. Charleston was, however, the original home of the 1986 Obey campaign, and played a small part in the phenomenology of Andre the Giant Has a Posse. OBEY spanned the globe, growing out of the cosmopolitan seaside city of Charleston, into a world-wide phenomenon in urban street art.

But this post isn't about the guy who famously created Andre the Giant has a Posse, and the Obama campaigns. This post is about two emerging graffiti campaigns - one spreading a message of the divine, and the other, on the side of The Cosmopolitan Charlestonian's house.

Over the course of the last few months a string of introspective graffiti art has been showing up on the streets of downtown Charleston. Applied by stencil, each one presents a thought-provoking statement to passers-by. The campaign's deeper substance, however, is rooted in the question, "what is 1.618?" And this is where divinity comes in.

The answer to the 1.618 question is, Phi.

For 1.618 is the measurement of divine proportion, also known as "the golden ratio." Studied by Divinci and found over and over again in nature, 1.618 is a representation of divine perfection and beauty.The depth of the message in a good graffiti campaign is not lost on us, but the line between property damage and free expression is often crossed by urban graffiti art. The difference between art appreciation and property value depreciation is obviously made clear when it happens to you.

Bad graffiti campaigns seem to crop up everywhere in Charleston regardless of the fact that Charleston's officials continuously fight the graffiti movement.

Perhaps one can imagine why we may not find the message sprayed on our own wall quite as intriguing as the 1.618 campaign. This note, making a billboard out of the side of our home, simply states, "I'd like to take over this corner." Too bad for the artist a local Sherwin Williams store is one block away, and they know how to match colors. We are armed with exterior paint.

Regardless of being vandalization victims, we are going to continue to look down for those subtle messages, inspired by the divine, being sprayed most typically at ankle level, or directly on random sidewalks.

Torn between art appreciation and victimization, we're simply left trying to compromise. So, we submit this - Dear Universe: If for some reason we are to be revisited by the Graffiti Gods....will you at least send the guy with the deeply thoughtful messages?