Graffiti-strewn walls serve, in the urban scape, as ravines
and caverns did for the earliest artists who painted on rock. My
"Glyffiti" figures, merging with the ground of tags, posters and
scrawls, charge the scene with ancient echoes.
50,000 years ago dancers wearing horns emerged to sing and
shake before the rearing mountains and clouds. Dance over, they receded, like
the other animals, into the thorn. Today our urban vistas endlessly refract the
insistent cliché of advertising. Only in graffiti is there spontaneous
eruption. Graffiti, often obnoxious and insulting, is outside the grid. Some
are of it is as huge and complex as landscape panorama — gigantic sweeps of
energy in their tapestry of piled up scripts.
As I paint into these matted graffiti covered walls my
animal outlines, I feel kinship with neolithic artists who drew on un-tame raw
surfaces — an echo of the deep past. As with the earliest art this work of mine is intrinsically ephemeral.