Colorful Character M Artwork - Limited Edition of 10

Colorful Characters In New York City there’s a community called Long Island City. Once an industrial district populated by working class residents it has changed enormously. Now much of the original population and many of the businesses are gone, the funky brick and mortar replaced by soaring steel and glass and by a different class of people. In the 1990s, before gentrification there was an artist co-operative in a factory building nested along the tracks of the number 7 elevated line. In time the co-op became a mecca for street artists, the building covered in large murals known as pieces, as in masterpiece. Soon the building became known as 5 Pointz, a phrase that proclaimed the site to be the gathering place for all such artist throughout the city. But by the time the building was sold in 2011, 5Pointz had become a unifying symbol for not only New Yorkers but for many of the world’s top street artists. I spent the last year of its operation photographing there. But I wasn’t documenting the scene. Nor did I care for most of the work that covered its walls. Instead, I was interested in the haphazardly scrawled “tags” that were applied nightly to every flat surface at the site’s periphery. Whereas the “pieces” were respected and never painted over, the tags were violated with gusto until one could barely distinguish one from another. There I found my art, in the details of this jungle of shapes and color there emerged spontaneous creations, each a product of perhaps half a dozen hands that, to me, was as artful as any mid-twentieth century masterpiece by the gods of abstract expressionism. So, with this alphabet they’ve been tamed an now useful, in this case as a new way of quickly and cleverly communicating a thought, a pet name, a pet’s name, one’s initials, an impression, an expression, or even a statement with a sly wink and a real kick — for instance say . . . SOB, or FYI, or how about YOLO: You Only Live Once!