I moved to this neighborhood five years ago. In the first months here I slowly wore down my grief for the place I had left by walking and looking. And, with effort, I found I gradually tuned my inner sense of the beautiful to what I saw around me here.
I first noticed lichen scales and the glow of mossy - almost algal – green and gold stains on phone poles and the trunks of rough barked trees. On and about these same trees and poles I noticed the prevalence of mushrooms and shelf fungi. It seemed I had moved to a place that was enhanced and made lovely by yielding to decay.
More recently the color field walls and doors where graffiti has been inscribed and later concealed with paint have come to interest me. The overpaintings - usually semi-regular polygons diverging in color (to various degrees) from the original surface – have a poignancy, reflecting a dialog of two (or more) strangers over time, each claiming dominion over a surface and simultaneously asserting and contesting the use of that surface for purposes of display.
Building owners and long-time residents, finding me with my camera trained on their bricks, have expressed to me their disgust for the graffiti (and, obliquely, for the people who write it.) For some, the defaced door and wall may wound like an indignity and an impingement on the privacy which ownership should confer. The motivations of those who tag are doubtless wide ranging and complex, but may include the desire for a semi-anonymous notoriety, a shrugging off of privacy, a hasty excursion through public life. The city presents itself, after all, as endless planes: potential supports and frames and invitations for paint. I empathize both with the inclination to mark the surfaces and to cover the marks, and in the formal arrangements of these photographs I claim the painted surfaces, momentarily, for my own purposes.
I think there is more to be said about this – about aesthetics and the sense of home – and about the mutable meanings of paint in the public spaces of neighborhoods. But for now, several examples of paint in places.
