Master of Graffiti

NYtimes reports on a Williamsburg artist Ellen Harvey who creates her own masterpiece style of "graffiti art".

NYtimes....Between the summer of 1999 and the spring of 2001 Ms. Harvey embarked on a little folly. Mixing the goals of city beautification advocates and outlaw graffiti artists, she planted 40 small oval paintings of trees, mountains and streams, evoking 18th- and 19th-century painters like Albert Bierstadt and Caspar David Friedrich, on the 20th-century New York landscape. She put them on places that were already marked by graffiti artists: "I wondered what it would be like - at a time when everyone was expressing themselves in a codified aesthetic that people see as being aggressive - to make something incredibly small and very pretty."