Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 | Author:
Jowy Romano I’m excited to unveil a new feature on Subway Art Blog. There is a whole subset of subway art that has been underrepresented here on the blog and I hope to rectify this problem starting now.
Over the past several months I have been documenting all sorts of graffiti that I find in and around the subway. At first I was just doing it for fun; documenting Jim Joe’s work made me start paying closer attention to graffiti. For quite a while I had not posted these photos anywhere, but then decided the SAB flickr page was a perfect venue for them. Now that the casual flicks have turned into a larger collection of work, I think it is the right time to start showing them on the main page.
So this post will be the first in a series of graffiti features called “Tuesday Tag.”
It is fitting that the Subway Art Blog should have a regular feature on graffiti being that the New York City subway system is, in a lot of ways, the birthplace of this art movement.
And so I begin the Tuesday Tag with one of my favorite writers that I have never written about on the blog: 3ESS.
3ESS’s highly stylized, complex designs first caught my eye with a gold sticker placed on a trash can in the Marcy Avenue station. I had never seen so much effort put into a sticker before. It was made out of metallic gold paper and cut along the edges to match the shape of the tag.
3ESS has also done spray work in the subway. Quick throwups like the tag above can be found along the J train.
One thing I find interesting about 3ESS’s tag and a lot of other current graffiti writers’ is the blurring of the line between letters and numbers. Many seem to be interchangeable like 3 and B, 5 and S, 7 and T. I interpret the 3 in 3ESS as a B, so that would make it pronounced ‘Bess,’ which I imagine is short for ‘best.’ Since he is the first person to go by this name, that would make him “Best One.”
Courtesy of 3ess.hw.*'s flickr
The artist has done larger scale work on walls, tunnels, rooftops, trucks, freight trains, and more. You can find a ton more of his work on flickr: 3ess.hw.*
