It started out as a little scribble I made at a company meeting I was paying absolutely no attention to. I can't describe the feeling I received exactly; sort of like an "ompt!" as if you had just forgot something really important and needed to rush right back to where this most important things was... but the other side of that coin; the Bizarro "ompt!" (!tpmo). It was just a scribble in my notebook; it almost looks like I was busily trying to get my pen to work again. Something about the wandering lines. Oh, it caught me.
So I tore out the scribble and stuffed it promptly into my wallet as well as sticking it well into my mind. All I knew is that I wanted it BIG. I thought of places to do this... "Thing". The ceiling of my room seemed perfect, but there's a light in the middle and that just wouldn't do. A wall would work, but come to think of it, I didn't want to paint over anything when I move out in less than two months. So I crammed it a bit deeper, but planned it all at the same time.
I take the bus to and from school. Actually, I take a string of buses and it takes almost an hour to get to school some days. A fight broke out in the bus I rode last week and that was really, just what I expect from the mighty Public Transportation System. Soon, oh not soon enough, I will get the '87 Toyota Corolla with enough mileage to have made it to the moon. The person I was going to buy it exploded the water cooler gizmo and claimed it was the first thing to go wrong in... ages!
I usually get off the bus a street after my apartment so I can cross the Blvd. using a pedestrian bridge. It was built to connect a school on one side, to what I thought for the longest time to be a parking lot. It makes absolutely no sense, but upon further urban exploring, the parking lot used to be a tennis court; the big mound of dirt and debris to the right may have been a playground or just a plain park. There's a community garden to the left of all this. One of the more peculiar things about this area are these huge concrete walls in the court/parking lot.
They have no real use and seemed to have been put there by ancient, neolithic megalith-builders. One of the walls had this funky enviro-painting. From the looks of it, it's from little kiddies; dead dolphins, a satelite view of a polluted earth, actually bobbing in an ocean of oil, with arrows that state "oil" pointing to oils slicks, just in case you were a bit dense. This painting is somehow connected to the school, or former school. There was another concrete wall on the other side of the parking lot and the moment I saw it that day, I knew where I would paint.
After school a few days after, I walked into the lot and checked out the wall, real close like. I held an invisible brush to the creme-colored concrete and made phantom strokes. The wall must be at least 7 feet tall, I didn't have my ghostly ruler at the time to be sure. I went over the lines I wanted to paint, swooping many lengths of my body to act out the correct proportion of the pastel sketch I had done that school day, what I needed to accomplish on this wall. Painting this would be a dance.
That Friday, I bought fifty bucks worth of acrylics and made whispers of a secret project to the girl behind the counter. I don't know how to use acrylics, but they seem to be the right medium to use. I didn't want to just tag the wall with spray paint; that would be expected and not out of the ordinary for an urban setting. It would take me seconds to spray out my little design. The texture wouldn't be right. The colors wouldn't be right. Nothing would be right.
From the beginning, this big little project seemed like a very Bad idea, with little gain from a lot of risk. To begin with, the target wall was next to one of the busiest roads in Denver, meaning the chances that a person of Authority would drive by were great. Magnifying this was the fact that the wall itself was a watermelon spit away from a fire department. Fire departments have to be one of those buildings that have a direct line to the police. The wall I wanted to paint faces the department. This area is also frighteningly close to a hospital, with security so thick I have yet even tried to skateboard this campus. Security guards - also people with easy ties with the Po-lease.
So I did some weighing in my head. What could be the worst thing that could happen? I would be arrested, thrown in jail, given a court date where I would plead guilty to... something, given a hefty fine and probably some public service hours. I'm thinking trash collection or somewheres along those lines. Something to make me realize the wrongs in my ways.
My twisted brain came up with the sheath to hide this fact from me. "You", I said, "would benefit from being arrested. You would have at least painted half of whatever kooky thing you wanted, with enough left blank to have people ask, 'what happened here? Gosh, it looks... unfinished'. You would then have proof, yes proof! of society NOT wanting art work on an otherwise, blank wall and a symbol (the ticket, or the fine) to rally other artists and like-minded people to help you overcome this dastardly swift hand of 'justice'". I then thought of all the famous people I knew that had gotten arrested. Well, not by name, but it comes with the territory, right? There must have been a few... million Dadaists arrested for their little ready-mades. This step down would be the first step up! A suicide mission. God, I really need to get laid.
I locked myself into this and picked Sunday at five am as the Time. I mean, who's even going to be around at then?! I'll shave a wee bit of risk in the name of a better composition. If less trouble comes my way, the more time I can work on that stupid scribble. I have to say I've never done something so large and so abstract before. I still don't buy into much art made after 1960. It's silly. This is another story altogether... or is it?
On Saturday night, I was forcing myself to sleep at 11 pm. I sleep on a full size mattress I found in the trash and yes, it smells a bit ripe and yes, I'll never be able to invite a girl to my room without full-on laughter, but it's comfortable enough sleeping without a fan or A/C in the height of the Colorado summer drought. I put on some Cibbo Mato to ease myself into dreamland, where abstract shapes float by me at whim. I had set the alarm to play a live version "Alison" by The Pixies, it's about planets crashing into suns and visions of beautiful girls; appropriate for getting oneself out of bed right before the sun.
But, I can't get to sleep. I feel like I was about to ask the prettiest girl out on a date and not knowing if I was in her league or even in her world. Glory of winning only Roman gladiators have felt if she's says that simple three-lettered word... absolute terror and humiliation if the smaller, sharper, two lettered one were echoed. Butterflies in my stomach the size of wolf bats, the variety that live 10,000 miles away in jungles I can't pronounce that hunt varmints the size of my fucking head - a family of those, shattering around my plumbing.
I Took a piss and checked the clock. 4 am. Not worth going back asleep for that hour. Got together the paint and brushes and water bucket I grouped before I went to sleep and took a walk on red hot coals to the site. If I saw someone with a 2 gallon bucket full of water at 4 am on Sunday, I wouldn't know what to think, except that water was for an all-night car wash or someone's going to get real wet, real soon. Proceeded to the wall, threw my backpack down and sorted my paints, brushes, paper plates and my thumbnail pastel. I brought a pastel and wrote down my own phone number since I can't remember it by myself. I didn't bring any identification, something told me this would be a better situation if something did arise. I could at least could my roommate for help at the Station. I'm so smart in some instances, a petty fool in most everything else.
My ninja outfit for this trek consisted of my black khaki Dockers and a navy blue Hartford Fire Department sweat shirt I received as a Christmas gift from my brother-in-law. I thought maybe if the local fire boys give me trouble, they'll be easy on me when they peep the emblem on the shirt. I must look like a imsomniac looking for a laundromat
A taxi going very slow near the site started my nervousness, creeping into shadows to escape its gaze. I have 50 yards of brightly lit parking lot before I'll get into the shadow of the wall, safe from the very brightly lit room of the fire department. The night and little ideas like this painting makes everything in the world mysterious and wonderful. People grow up and forget the feeling you have when you were ten and rode your bike into neighborhoods you weren't supposed to be in, playing a game of baseball with strange kids and forgetting what time the Sunday family dinner was, coming home without socks for some reason and lots of questions you couldn't answer cause you felt ashamed.
Squeezing out 2 entire tubes of black, slopping my 3 inch brush in some water and then into the paint and I began drawing long, curved lines. My God, these marks are huge and are crying away from the light wall. I have grown from 6 feet high and a few feet wide to the wall's 20 by 7 feet. I am an urban lighthouse. Any eyes wandering will be on me. I began to paint quicker, nervous I was going to screw the painting up, that I would take the 2 inch high thumbnail and blow it up 70 times that size WRONG, running away without taking my supplies with me in disgust. "Fuck!", I'll yell in my pillow at home like a little girl. The lines were coming out fine, I ran out of black right just when I didn't need no black anymore.
Bouncing off the wall, I saw the inevitable flashing of police lights. Crouching, as if that would help, I waited to see what would happen. The vehicle turned onto the street I was on and turned again to the street the firehouse was on. Before I lost sight, I got a glimpse that the lights actually belonged to an ambulance. Close.
I was keeping the same brush I used for the black lines for the color, since it seemed to be good at putting gobs of paint on the wall at one time. On Violet! On Red! On Green! Switching to some cheap, small brush for yellow and I was done and already packing open tubes of paint and the used paper plates in my backpack. Waling home, I was carrying the dirty water without incident and made some frozen orange juice I found in the freezer, thinking about what I created. Glancing at the clock; 4:30. Not only was it the largest painting I've ever done, it also took the least amount of time. I cleaned my brushes, poured the dirty water into the toilet and cleaned paint from everything I brought.
I took my roommate to the site for pictures and because she was curious what her messed up roommate was doing. She seemed to like it. We snapped some photos of my being all hip and tough near the wall. The more I look at those pictures, the more I think how stupid and brainless the painting is. I thought this perhaps because I keep a stratospheric bar I always make myself jump over for everything; be it a drawing or how I sort my clothes. Or, it may be because the painting really is stupid and brainless.
When I see it in person, every time I come home from school, it honestly does do exactly what I wanted it to do: it makes me smile and reminds me that happiness doesn't need to be any more complicated than a little paint on a forgotten wall. I like the composition, what other people may think of the painting the texture and immediacy of the lines. I want someone to tell me their 6 year old kid could do this painting, just so I could come back with "Well, how would the kid reach the top there?", turning and laughing away, yelling, "Dada!"
