Aging graffiti artists still have urge to tag

Graffiti artist Angel "LA II" Ortiz, 45, poses for photos with one of his creations, in a schoolyard on New York's Lower East Side, July 27, 2012. / AP Photo/Richard Drew

NEW YORK (AP) - In torn jeans and saddled with a black backpack, Andrew Witten glances up and down the street for police. The 51-year-old then whips out a black marker scribbles 'Zephyr' on a wall covered with movie posters. He admires his work for a few seconds before his tattooed arms reach for his daughter, holding her hand as he briskly walks away.

Witten and a generation of urban kids who spray-painted their initials all over Manhattan in the 1970s and '80s and landed in the city's street art scene are coming of age - middle age, that is.

And like Witten, a 51-year-old single father, some street artists considered now to be graffiti elders are having trouble putting away their spray paint cans. As Witten says, "I'm ready. I could go tonight."

"I'm chronologically old to be out there doing it," Witten admits with a playful smile. "I'm sure I can't run quite as fast."

Witten built a reputation as a master at spray-painting extravagant graffiti pieces on freight and subway trains, called train-bombing, in the neighborhoods where he now teaches his 6-year-old daughter, Lulu, to skateboard. For him, spray-painting other people's property with his nickname, or tag, is almost an addiction, and danger is part of the drug. Crawling under barbed wire, ducking from police officers, even being shot at is all part of the experience.

But with an artist's heart, Witten describes painting graffiti in more poetic terms. He calls it a freeing experience, in which the silence of night gives way to the hiss and mist of the spray rising into the moonlight.

Angel Ortiz recently served 41 days of a 50-day sentence in the Rikers Island jail system after being busted for spraying his tag, LA Roc, on a billboard in March of last year. For decades, Ortiz, 45, has been known on Manhattan's Lower East Side as LA II. A traumatic loss of a girlfriend brought him out of a 14-year hiatus from graffiti writing. He has since been caught three times spraying his tag on property, each time while walking a friend's dog.

"Everywhere that dog stopped to pee I would write my name," Ortiz says. "The streets were like my canvases. I just started writing my name everywhere."

When a pair of police officers smelled the fresh paint and nabbed Ortiz, they asked if he saw himself as too old to be doing graffiti. But even now, Ortiz keeps a spray can or marker in his pocket to satisfy that incessant itch to tag mailboxes, signs and fire hydrants.

Ortiz often recalls those golden days in the '80s, when graffiti became the focal point of the counterculture art world and he partied with Madonna and Andy Warhol. He still lives in the neighborhood where a young art school dropout named Keith Haring showed up at his doorstep in cutoff jeans and glasses asking about his tagging style.

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[DefacingAmerica]

jd2408 and saber72 are right. Graffiti "vandals" or graffiti "criminals" is more appropriate than graffiti "artists? The story introduces us to Angel Ortiz who "recently served 41 days of a 50-day sentence in the Rikers Island jail system after being busted for spraying his tag, LA Roc, on a billboard in March of last year." Such descriptions of obvious crimes are somehow equated as part of an artistic movement. As described at www.DefacingAmerica.com, these graffiti vandals are inflicting $12 billion dollars in damages on us each year. Graffiti experts caution that graffiti vandalism often serves as a gateway crime to even more harmful crimes like theft and burglary. Entire neighborhoods are devalued by such acts of vandalism. How is placing your name on the property of others "art"? It isn't. We don't have an art problem in America. We have a vandalism problem.

[jd2408]

Stupid media glorifying these creeps destruction of property. This is not art and they are not in the least artist. They are criminals who have no respect for other peoples property. It costs cities millions of dollars to clean up their garbage and they set a poor example to young kids who feel its no problem to do the same thing. 41 days is not long enough at least 6 months plus a clean up fine would be a good start.

[saber72]

agreed