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Friday, January 20, 2006

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This love shit got me twisted. I can’t even speak without my feelings trying to mix into my sentence. It’s
understandable to the point my heart beats so hard on my way to see you, that it seems my headphones are way to loud and I suddenly wonder who sped up the bass on the Looptroops instrumental. That’s when I realize how crazy it is, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world, never. My love, my passion, my canvas, my wall.
    I am 17 years young and I am an Urban Artist. A graff head, a bomber, a writer, a tagger, but I prefer artist, it helps this socially challenged society to accept me. Most of you have one name, one name you’ve always known and were given to you; names like John, David, Daniel, Sarah or even Diane but I have two. One is Eric, given to me by my parents. The other, a name I have created, from the deep dwellings of my imagination and my will to be free, my shadow identity, my alter-ego Mint.
It all started when I was three, and the first wall I had grown to love was in my living room. I had crayola’d that wall up and down, so many times, that my parents would repaint it every four days. My parents never really punished me for it, because at the time, they were reading into child creativity. That happens a lot you know, parents stress and read into every book, article or story about babies, so their first born could be this beautiful, perfect child, but later on they find out that no ones perfect. That’s why I love art. In art you can make the ugly and the imperfect into beautiful seamless creations.
That’s what I first thought of “My Wall” when I first laid my eager eyes on it. Between the local hardware store and the market lay my joy, my fixer-upper, and my soon to be canvas. It was at the end of the alley, littered with trash and old decaying “stuff”. Spider webs spun off the fire exits from the two buildings and draped down to create a thin, light curtain. It was ugly and imperfect. Just like the rest of the world around us, so I decided to do my part, and paint and make art of this wall, something that would help this ugly world conform. As this little project of mine progressed, the spray-paint cans stacked, and I was saving my lunch money to buy more additional supplies. I came home late every night, and my mom was questioning my study time. I told her I decided to quit school to become a bum and beg full time, she laughed, and lightly shoved me into my room to start my homework. But I couldn’t do it, I had more important things on my mind, I had the pressure of the world on my shoulders, that ugly flat structure needed me, it was calling me.
As days passed, I began to skip classes to go back to my “place” earlier. Once in awhile I would have interested onlookers who stood at the beginning of the alley, just watching. They never asked me what I was doing, but just gazed at my canvas. Like a mad scientist, I was painting away, and the more I painted, the more I became infatuated. Until one fateful day, I was torn from my lover. Sirens and lights illuminated and pulsed through my alley. Lights shot through the webs and made ghastly, eerie shadows onto my progressing wall.
”Hey kid, come out here, we can’t have you painting on that wall. Come here real quick, we just wanna talk.” Yea right I thought, I ran for the fire ladder. I got both my feet onto the first bar until I was pulled down, my chin clanked against the bar and I fell onto my stomach. I lost my breath, and my ribs hurt from the fall, I got pulled up and I hunched over as they spoke to me. I didn’t hear or listen to anything they said, damn cops, they ruin everything. I had won a free ticket home and a beating from my dad. It was easier to push him away this time because he was so drunk, he just dumped over and fell asleep. The next day he wouldn’t let me go out, not even to school. I stayed home and thought about my wall all day, I thought about it so much I didn’t eat, I just doodled in my notebook, thinking how I would approach my date, and how I would apologize for being a stiff that night.
The next day after school was over, I ran over to my wall. There was some man dressed in overalls, and was walking out of the alley. He carried a bucket of paint and walked away with remnants of my love smeared on his brush. They had painted over it, they had ruined my wall. I sighed and sat on the sooty oil floor. I started to wallow until I noticed that they had left my paint there still. I got up and immediately painted one of my newest drawings. It was a piece I created by drawing something that came to me in a dream. I was a titan, a giant, a mass hunk of human and I gently roamed the earth. I stumbled over trees and splashed in lakes, I even was big enough for the clouds to interfere with my vision. Foot prints I created left markings as big as mountains and as wide as infinity. I was free and no one was big enough to tell me what to do. I could do as I wish, when I wanted. It really made me think about my will to be free. The same struggle and urge any human being gets when trapped into a place they don’t want to be in. When they believe they are meant for a greater purpose, or are needed somewhere else, but can’t seem to find their way out. One of those helpless, entangled human being was me at one point, but now I’m looking for freedom, yea freedom, I’m all for it.

It’s been sixteen years since I’ve seen that wall. Right after I had graduated high school, I went backpacking all over the country; first California, then to Nevada, Utah, Denver, Nebraska, and so on. I traveled to two countries in North America, eight in Asia, and currently staying in Bordeaux, France for a couple of weeks. With my sixteen years I have become an artist, or you could say, a bum who can paint (My mom was right, I should have studied more). I have gone country to country, searching and looking for hideous and ugly brick structures; walls that catch my attention with their “toy” graffiti and aging cracks. I have muraled a number of countless walls, and my walls attract attention from the public, that deem them “too beautiful for the streets”. I have devoted my life to creating ugly and imperfect walls, into something beautiful. Helping this world understand that ugly is not useless, and the sight of ugly is in the perception of the viewer. My goal is to create something that you’ll look at and would hit you in the face, like a kid on Christmas morning finding “an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle”. But for now, my new love and I have a date; she’s waiting for me between Third Street and Peachtree, in the alley.


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