Having a mural is really like living with a mural — you don’t ‘hang’ a mural as you do a painting or a poster — a wall mural is a living thing that takes over its immediate environment making surrounding objects fade into the visual background. It warms the room, removing your mind and your subconscious into the image, transporting you to another place.  Mural size is all important — can you imagine the lack of effect a muralist would have if their creations were the size of average paintings? Large images send stronger, louder messages than images the size of photos, posters or paintings.

Increasingly technology is enhancing what can be done with digital photos. Wallpaper and various other home decorating stores are growing their product lines of mural-type wallpapers, or photo mural products. Photo murals were rare just a few short years ago but are increasing in popularity and affordability. High tech mural products create amazing interiors that bring the outdoors inside or magnify images for intense artistic effect. Adding size to images goes beyond changing the ambience of a room; large images alter the mood of occupants entirely.

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With the coming of age of digital cameras in the last decade or so, we noticed that technology and software was opening up what is possible and affordable for photographers and interior-minded people that weren’t necessarily artists.  Kneson Software (www.kneson.com), a company that already had created a sophisticated photo enlargement program called Imagener realized that it was only natural to use the engine inside Imagener and make a mural program able to take enlarged images and print them in panels much the same way billboard advertisements are produced. (more…)

I’ve increasingly noticed a trend of creating murals where ugly, defacing graffiti used to be. Here in San Diego where I live this trend has been growing for some time, and it seems to be growing elsewhere as this story from Canada states – see “Police turn to artists to stop writing on the wall.”

Graffiti is the “sleazy side of murals” and I’ve always wondered why anyone would do it. I was on a recent trip by train from Atlantic City to Philadelphia, PA and noticed all the graffiti covering railway underpasses. Who does this? And with barely any of it understandable, what are they trying to convey? My only understanding up to this point is that it is to “mark territory” for gangs and the like, but it seems so creepy.

As I struggle to understand how the mind of someone that does this type of thing works, I also find it curious that the one thing that has been found to curb and even stop repeated graffiti tagging is to replace it with actual mural art — and that this works consistently and with most taggers. Is this a statement that even the criminal mind as a social group has a collective boundary to not destroy art?