Street artists use cleaning supplies like scrubbing brushes, detergents and power washes to wash away dust and grime revealing cleaned, sparkling surfaces. The artists polish text and images out of dirt-ridden walls, cleaning their message into the surface much like writing your name on the back of a dusty car window.
Paul Curtis, aka Moose, is the United Kingdom based street artist who started the reverse graffiti movement, scrapping parts of walls clean in Leeds and London. The artist's work has garnered so much attention that he has even been commissioned to turn his technique into innovative advertising projects for brands as big as Smirnoff vodka. Another artist, Alexandre Orion, uses the street art style as a call to action, encouraging Brazilian citizens and officials to become environmental aware.
Alexandre Orion is most famous for his skull mural, completed in a Sao Paolo, Brazil, transport tunnel, alluding to the detrimental impact of toxic emissions on the environment. The Big Brother Eye, etched into a road sign in Leeds, and the Reverse Graffiti Project, a wall mural in San Francisco, are both popular works by Moose.
The new wave street art style has stirred up legal issues as to whether the cleaning is still considered vandalism. Artists are not defacing public property, so more often than not, city officials are forced to have the entire area the work spans across cleaned, as well as other potential locations. Artists taking on commissioned projects raises a red flag in countries like the UK where the work may fall under illegal advertising.