Why Do Murals Make Me Happy?

My photo is from Montreal, where graffiti and street art do not always co-exist peacefully.

The idea of someone having the artistic huevos to put this much color on brick walls makes me giddy with rebellion and envious pleasure. “How do they DO that,” my unartistic self says to my art-appreciation self.

More importantly, how cool is it that this street artist was able to display their talent? In Montreal, where the above was taken, the city encourages “legal” murals by designating particular walls that artists can use to create murals. They also support public art beautification, claiming the “longest-running” graffiti festival, which dates from 1996, and another MURAL Festival they launched in 2012. Even so, the illegal graffiti sneaks in, to the dismay of the city fathers and the delight of the graffiti artists, bien sûr. Source: https://montrealserai.com/_archives/2005_Volume_18/18_2/Article_3.htm

Prague mural — with graffiti below it.

My heart skips a beat. A four-story building wall provides the backdrop for this one! It looks almost like a photograph. It’s an entirely different style/mood/message from the Montreal piece above. But it still has an allure. I think the size of this work speaks to me. I get equally moved by an impossibly long trestle bridge or an iconic skyscraper, like the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco.