Jean-Michel Basquiat was raised in a time and place where many new art forms were being created, perfected, and were honestly becoming a lifestyle for the first time in America. Art forms such as hip-hop, graffiti, and break dancing which evolved around housing projects in the various boroughs of New York City as an outlet for expression mainly by the minorities inhabiting this area. Basquiat’s art began as graffiti and then he quickly moved onto other mediums first music and then painting but he always painted on random objects that he would pull off of the streets such as doors and windows and any other discarded items with relatively blank surfaces. In this sense the streets of New York always constantly remained an underlying theme throughout most of his artwork. His work gained great recognition during his short career but was never completely accepted or taken seriously by the upper echelon of the art community. After his death he still remains an extremely popular artist to many even though there are still mixed feelings about the complexity and credibility of his work by the art community, whatever that is.
Basquiat’s work is visually inviting to all audiences of any age but it is not until one looks deeper into his paintings that they are turned off by encrypted messages of a time in history or a political charged message that they may not agree with. I believe that there is much controversy surrounding these paintings because the truth that he conveyed in his work was to raw, ugly or beautiful as it may be, for many. That along with his race, his use of such raw material, and his use of bold and crude imagery made him any easy candidate for having his notoriety as an artist defiled by many upstanding art critiques world-wide. But for others who have not had large sticks up their ass most of their lives and believe that art has and always will be open to all to create and view, he remains a highly revered artist appreciated for the intensity of the emotions he portrays with his use of color and the complexity of the messages that his rudimentary forms are capable of revealing. The confidence that Jean-Michel had in himself as an artist and as an active catalyst for change in his community was truly inspiring to me. It was as if he considered his existence alone as living art in which he only needed a medium to communicate, conventional schooling was not necessary for his training, just the belief that life was sacred and that all are capable of using the means around them to create art of the highest quality as long as they are always true to themselves and uphold that integrity for as long as they exist. He started a band with a close friend and neither him nor his friend were musicians by any standards but they were confident in their endeavors and they gained recognition maybe not on a macro scale but at least within the confines of New York City, based solely off of their confidence as artists with a message to portray. Basquiat’s work is an invitation for to join in the most beautiful of all human experiences, creation, and is also a guide and foundation for others to create uninhibited work coming from within the soul and straight out of the hand onto a medium of their choosing.
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