‘A Love Letter for you’ is one of those projects that you wish you had thought of, it features the murals that are remarkable sweet and touching. They feature short poems and quotes , reminiscent of old school soul lyrics. The murals are across the skyline of Philadelphia, evocative of the old advertisements painted on the sides of houses. The idea is simple the execution is genius, designs that work with the landscape and culture of the area to create truly surprising pieces. The best kind of street art is the kind that catches you off guard and just makes you smile and this definitely does that. So I dropped a line to the lovely Steve who agreed to answer a few questions about how the project all got started.
What was it that originally inspired the ‘a love letter for you’ project?
Being on the train as a youth and seeing girls look at the graffiti on the rooftops facing the elevated. Even though they always looked at the graffiti, they weren’t all that interested in talking to me about it, so I thought about creating graffiti that girls would want to talk about, for the lovers who’d want to talk to them.
The murals are both romantic and inspirational, did you want the pieces to have a deeper message to society or were they more designed just to make people smile?
Yes to both
The pieces are more like the painted advertisements of the 50′s than conventional graffiti do you think that you would have had the same kind of acceptance for the project if you had gone down the route of conventional graffiti?
Graffiti is only graffiti if it’s non-conventional. Once graffiti coalesces into convention its just decoration. My graffiti defies convention, pretension and prevention. The guiding influence in Love Letter are two distinct schools of painted American letterforms, Sign Painting and Graffiti. I’ve painted graffiti that looks like signage and vice-versa. In Love Letter, we followed the basic rules of sign painting, but we used spraypaint and graffiti’s palette and speed in order to maximize the impact and fun.
Other graffiti artists such as Banksy have taken their artwork out of it’s original location and taken it to other cities around the world, would you ever try and recreate the love letter project somewhere else?
I started Love Letter in Dublin and Belfast. Letters like these overcome all distance. It might be the distance that gives them power
You have had some interesting comments about the murals one women commented ‘If someone did that for me I’d like it better than being taken to Red Lobster’ what is the most interesting comment you have heard about the project so far?
I don’t know, is busting out in tears a more interesting comment?
You can find out more about the ‘a love letter for you’ project on their website, I have picked a few of my favourites but essentially they are all awesome.
