No longer rogue

Mickey Mouse and the Pink Panther are having a battle on the back wall of the Butler Park restroom.

Splatters of paint remain from their two-dimensional war at the top of the park’s hill on Ninth Street.

But it’s not the only paint war in Bloomington.

In July, the City of Bloomington initiated a Downtown Graffiti Removal Pilot Program consisting of two city employees who remove graffiti from walls between Ninth and Third streets and between Indiana Avenue and the B-Line Trail.

But with 30-some regular graffiti artists in the area and minimal, free wall space, graffiti defacing private walls is a never-ending cycle.

“If you don’t want it to happen, you need to find a space for us to do it,” graffiti artist Mike Burchfield says. “It’s not rocket science.”

On May 18, 2010, Burchfield was arrested for painting what he thought was a free wall — a wall provided by a business for graffiti artists to paint, usually as long as they have the owner’s business card.

Burchfield was charged with seven counts of criminal mischief — a class B misdemeanor — and pleaded guilty to one. He spent one night in jail and 360 days on probation.

Now, the City of Bloomington contracts him to paint murals around town, including the one at Butler Park.

“I’m not hired as a graffiti artist,” Burchfield says. “But the wall’s full of characters with spray paint cans in their hands.”

He’s painted the stage at Third Street Park for the city in addition to the wall at Butler Park. Since his murals were completed at the beginning of the summer, no other artist has illegally painted the walls.

“They were re-painting that wall once or twice a week,” Burchfield says of the Butler Park restroom. “They paid more to fix it than they did to pay me.”

A graffiti artist for 15 years, Burchfield admits he has more to learn.

“I’ve not even reached the full potential of where you can take it,” he says. “You can mimic every other utensil with a spray paint can. It’s limitless, really.”

Burchfield keeps a tackle box of any spray paint caps he can get his hands on, each giving his stroke a different pattern or weight.

He tries to incorporate texture, shadows and shading in his graffiti, as well as a structure that makes every piece of the mural seem to fit together appropriately.

As a day job, however, he is contracted to paint anything from standard walls in an apartment to 400-foot-wide walls at Cook Pharmica.

“I love painting historic houses, all the intricate woodwork,” he says. “I’m a perfectionist by nature. By the end, I know every detail of the house.”

At night and on days off, Burchfield works on his murals, sometime spending a few days and hundreds of dollars on one piece. But it’s hard to find space for that kind of work.

“Legal walls are painted over and over again,” he says. “It’s frustrating because you paint something that takes 20 to 30 hours, and in two to three days, it’s painted over.”

The city may want to keep graffiti to a minimum, but Burchfield’s mission is to provide graffiti artists with free walls and educate local businesses on preventing defacement on their walls.

“Providing space is pretty key,” he says. “There’s not much I can do, but the key is having the space.”

When artists need to know what to paint over on free walls, Burchfield is the guy to call.

And when the city council met over the summer, Burchfield attended to explain that some of the tactics local businesses use to get rid of graffiti are in fact attracting it.

“If they use a different color than what their building is to go over it, someone else is going to graffiti it,” he says. “It’s pretty much a challenge.

“Everybody that does graffiti has their own guidelines,” he adds. “But I’m not big on graffiti on these mom and pop shops. It’s costly.”

In early November, a new studio at the edge of the Bloomington Entertainment & Arts District will open, providing graffiti artists and community members a new public wall to paint.

“We want community involvement,” he says. “If you want to paint something on a huge scale, come try it out. Or just throw paint on a wall. I have. It’s fun.”

The collaborative studio, a brainchild of local artist Adam Nahaus, will give community members the opportunity to stop by during business hours and see artists of various media at work.

In the studio and on free walls, Burchfield hopes to receive a response with his artwork, not a misdemeanor charge.

“I wanted to make kids and parents interact,” he says about the Butler Park wall. “So I put really old cartoons with new cartoons. While I was painting it, this little girl and her grandpa came up, and she said, ‘Oh, that’s Mickey Mouse, but who’s that?’ And her grandpa said, ‘That’s the Pink Panther. That’s Popeye.’

“That’s what I wanted to happen, but you don’t usually get to see it. It was neat to hear.”