Canned art

INDIANAPOLIS -- With a closely shaven head, a thick goatee, a light blue sports jersey and a full smile, Matt Lawrence chatted and laughed with people beneath a tent set up in front of a large mural, roughly 20 feet tall and 30 feet across, that he and another artist had worked on earlier Saturday.\nEver polite, Lawrence, the founder and director of the Urban Artist Network, gently broke away from his conversation to greet strangers who wandered through the public art exhibition Lawrence organized.\nLawrence was quick to make them feel welcome. People on the street were drawn into an alley in Broad Ripple, a neighborhood on the north side of Indianapolis, by the click-clack of aerosol cans to watch murals come to life.\nWhat made these murals unique was not that Lawrence and his fellow muralists didn't own the canvas -- that's to be expected for nearly all muralists. The uniqueness stemmed from the fact that if these muralists did their artwork at any time other than the window they'd been allotted, they would almost certainly be arrested. \nLawrence's Urban Artist Network presented Subsurface, Indianapolis' second Midwest graffiti expo. Saturday and Sunday. More than 40 artists attended.\nWith cooperation from the Indianapolis Arts Center and the Broad Ripple Village Association, Lawrence said he designed to showcase the artists in a very positive environment. He said he hoped the event would help to alleviate the negative perception the public often has about graffiti and inform people of the beauty the art form is capable of producing.\nGraffiti, derived from the Greek word graphein, meaning "to write," has been found as far back in civilization as Ancient Rome. Graffiti art, the vandalistic kind associated with 20th-century urban environments, is sometimes known as "hip-hop" or "New York style" graffiti, and came into prominence in the New York subway system in the 1970s.\nGraffiti was initially treated as a nuisance more than a renaissance, but over the next few years, it began to crawl from bridges and buildings to galleries and museums. It spurred the interest of art scholars and academics and was simultaneously being picked up and "legitimized" by professional modern artists, such as the late Keith Haring. \nLawrence said many of the artists, who participated the expo by invitation only, come from a variety of backgrounds in the arts, including professional artists, custom sign painters, set designers and illustrators. Most prefer the comfort of pseudonyms for their graffiti.\nScribe, a tall man with horned glasses and a gas-mask hanging loosely around his neck, is one such artist who tags his work using a moniker. He paints professionally for the Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo.\n"Art is three-quarters motivation, not sitting around waiting for something to happen," Scribe said. "There are people who just want to be discovered, but you can't stop working."\nLargely a self-educated artist who attended the Kansas City Art Institute for a year, Scribe said being an artist involves doing any small job -- sometimes for free -- to advance your career.\nScribe's section of the mural is a vast forest scene, and his painting partners have created two trees in drastically different fashions. One tree at the far left end of the wall is large and mystical, like something from a fairy tale. Another tree is ferric and metallic, with branches like beams of steel and liquid leaves dripping off. \nOne of Scribe's painting partners sprays two quick squirts from the can into the air to bring up the sharpest paint before applying it to the wall. Each can is tipped with different nozzles, controlling the scope and amount of paint able to be sprayed.\nScribe's contributions to the forest scene -- a gigantic rhinoceros dressed as Paul Bunyan being brought down by gophers who have roped his wrists, and an obese, cartoonish beaver -- reflect his background in children's illustrations. \nHe said he has ambitions of becoming a full-time illustrator, reaching the point professionally "when people start turning you loose because they trust you."\nLawrence called the expo "public art" and a "beautification project for Broad Ripple's cultural district," and to his happiness, the public noticed.\nEllie Clapp, a resident of Zionsville, Ind., a suburb on Indianapolis' north side, said it's an art form people embrace, and she's glad the artists have an outlet for it.\n"It's pure modern art to me," she said. "They really do show themselves as artists."\nClapp marveled at the detail, coordination and time put into the mural. The color scheme particularly surprised her, she said, and she methodically took in each segment of the mural with a critic's eye.\nMontana Cans, the event's sponsor, provided a rainbow's array of colors for the mural typically unseen in darker, more common graffiti: electric blues, potent reds, vibrant oranges, neon yellows, glowing greens and phosphorescent pinks, to name a few. \n"It's nice to see it up close instead of briefly as you drive under an overpass," she laughed.\nClapp noted the overwhelming male aerosol artist presence; every mural artist for the weekend was male. Lawrence said that while there are female graffiti artists, even popular ones with followings, it is a typically male-dominated art form due to its shadier beginnings.\nFor Scribe, it's important to be showcased, but more important, he said, it's important to hang out with his fellow artist friends. He said the graffiti arts events bring him together with a few friends from Cincinnati he is able to see only a few times a year. \nSince 1999, Lawrence's organization has painted about 15 murals, including three others in Broad Ripple and one near Indianapolis' downtown region that memorializes the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.\nBy the end of the weekend, the artists created another mural, this time nearly the size of a city block, with art styles that span the spectrum. Positioned behind the Broad Ripple branch of the Indianapolis post office, each building's section says something new, something different than the next. \nAll together it forms one coherent message for the people walking on the street: forget complaining about the graffiti, it seems to say, and learn to celebrate it.\n-- Contact senior writer Tony Sams at ajsams@indiana.edu.