Keith Haring

     Keith Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on May 4, 1958. From a early age he developed a love for drawing, learning cartooning skills from his father and from the popular culture around him, such as Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney.

In 1976 he graduated in high school and enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh.

Later that same year, Haring moved to New York City and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts (SVA) where experimented performance, video, installation and collage, while always maintaining a strong commitment to drawing.

Haring was also inspired by the work of Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Robert Henri’s.

Haring was determined to devote his career to creating public art.

As a student at SVA, Haring experimented with performing arts, video, installation and collage, while always maintaining a strong commitment to drawing.

He began to create drawings in white chalk upon these blank paper panels throughout the underground.

Haring devoted much of his time to public works with social messages. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, in dozens of cities around the world, many were created for charities, hospitals, children’s day care canters and orphanages.

In April 1986, Haring opened the Pop Shop, a retail store in Soho selling T-shirts, toys, posters, buttons and magnets bearing his images and painted the entire interior of the store in an abstract black on white mural.

In 1988 Keith Haring was diagnosed with AIDS and died at the age of 31 on February 16, 1990. In the last years of this life Haring created the Keith Haring Foundation to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and enlisted his imagery to speak about his own illness and make the people aware about AIDS.

 In my 2D sketchbook (page 51)  I did a copy of this mural (in the left) by Haring, called Pisa Mural. In this picture we can see a lot of different characters, with strange forms in the famous style of Keith Haring.

Haring in is work always tries to send some kind of social message, and in this work you can see that each character is trying to say something different, each one of this strange forms suggests an animal, an object or a situation.

The atmosphere of this work is happy and interactive, because allows the spectators to interact with the picture whilst trying figuring out the variety of characters, almost like a charade, and all the fun shapes and forms make the people smile and feel joyful.

This art work is all about line, shape, colours and about the current society. Each figure represents a different aspect of peace in the world: the “human” scissors are the image of solidarity between Man in defeating the serpent (that is, evil), which is already eating the head of the figure next to it; the woman with a baby in her arms represents maternity, and the two men supporting the dolphin refer to Man's relationship with nature.

On the first day Haring drew the black outline in the wall, without any kind of sketch and for the rest of the week, he filled the outlines with thick acrylic tempera paint, using brushes and making solid colours, creating a flat coloured mural with disorganized composition of shapes, filling the entire wall.

Haring picked strong and intriguing colours, like violet which had always been characteristic in his work, and took his inspiration from the colours of the buildings in Pisa, some darker than others.

In summary all of this makes this picture an intriguing and colourful piece of work that in my opinion makes everyone stop to think and smile.


Keith Haring website:  http://www.haring.com/ and http://www.haringkids.com/