It was 1998.  There was this street artist that lived in this place I used to live.  He wasn’t so much a street artist as he was an artist in the streets.  He would paint sidewalks with shadows and illuminate walls with hazy dreams.  He walked normal and talked normal.  His clothes were normal, but in his eyes there was something.  

-Why do you do this?

-Because the walls are here.

I always passed that off as meaning that I should mind my own business.  Why does anyone do anything?  Sometimes I’d see him doing his thing, and he’d humour me.  He’d talk about the weather and the trees, tell me stories of years past, and years to come.

-The world’s changing man, and we need to change with it.  We need to use the tools we’re given to make a difference, not become the difference.

There was always something deeper in his words that took me a while to understand.  His voice had subtle undertones of genius, but I failed to hear it at the time. 

We became friends like most men do.  It was a quest for knowledge, ideas, inspiration.  I wanted to learn about him, so I could learn about life.  There was a tired wisdom in his art, and I wanted to hear it in words.  It’s always something more to hear something than see something. 

The first time we got together I wanted him to paint a wall in my apartment.  It was a small apartment on the first floor of an old building.  By first floor, I mean it was up one floor, not the ground floor.  Overlooking the street was a window that robbed me of my privacy, but let the city nights in.  I wanted the wall behind the window to showcase his grandeur in his fashion; for the world to see.

-I won’t do it.

-Why not?

-It’s not what I do.

-It’s exactly what you do.

He laughed this laugh that still makes me smile.

-You don’t get it.  Come out and watch what I do if you want and then you’ll see what I mean. 

It was summer.  I had nothing better to do, so I took him up on his offer.  It was something that I never looked back on.  He took me into the depths of a subculture that was unknown then.  He let me peer at his brush strokes, and listen to the rattle of his spray cans.  I would watch him, and his form would dance about with the red bricks.  He would stare at walls, intimidating them, trying to make them flinch first, before he would let paint embrace their rough skin.  While he was painting he would explain to me what he was doing, and why he was doing it.

In the beginning I used to think of him as a makeup artist with an ego, just trying to make a crude city more aesthetic, just masking the real stories that life has made on the bricks.  I quickly learned that that was false.  It blows my mind to realize that I was so self-absorbed that I thought that of him.  He was an artist.  He painted life into forgotten walls.  The long drawn out breaths of his spray cans resuscitated hidden walls back to life with story and beauty.

I learned many things from him.  He taught me about art, classic, modern, postmodern, urban.  He taught me about life, his, mine, ours.  He taught me about beauty in creation.  It was only after knowing him for a longer period of time that I was surprised with the answer he gave me to a question.

-Why do you do this?

-Because, man, I’ve never known anything else. 

Sometimes I find myself repeating this story in my head.  I tell it over and over as I try to perfect it.  I tell it to myself as I look at dead walls that are asking to live.  I tell myself as my hands shake a rattle cans.  I tell myself as I try to intimidate walls into telling me the story that they want me to tell the world.