Looking for a Legal Place to Paint

Not all graffiti artists enjoy spray-painting on the run. Besides, it’s difficult to concentrate on your “ ‘piece” when you’re always scanning the streets for the police.

So some aerosol artists are trying to go straight, getting permission from public agencies and private businesses before embarking on spray-can projects.

A handful even showed up to negotiate with their erstwhile targets at an anti-graffiti summit held at Los Angeles City Hall in November.

At that time, graffiti artist “Frame” approached Caltrans about setting aside some walls where kids can paint. In exchange, he promised to put the word out to leave the rest of the freeways alone.

Larry Loudon, in charge of Caltrans maintenance in the San Gabriel Valley and other areas, says he finds the idea intriguing.

In fact, he was so taken with some mural art that he asked his superiors to let it remain. Although he was overruled--the agency’s policy is to remove all such markings--Loudon says Caltrans is now considering Frame’s idea.

“We’ve got some walls we just can’t keep clean, so maybe we can put something on there that’s not such trash graffiti,” Loudon says. “Some of that mural art is pretty.”

Last fall, Frame helped organize a graffiti day at the Los Angeles Photography Center, a city-run gallery near MacArthur Park. The center put up butcher paper inside the gallery and invited neighborhood youths to make graffiti on the paper--instead of on the outside of the building, which was getting “bombed” regularly.

More than 500 kids showed up, says Glenna Avila, the center’s director, who called the event a huge success.

Even the beleaguered RTD has held 25 meetings with “taggers” in ongoing attempts to negotiate a truce, says Rebecca V. Barrantes, an RTD spokeswoman.

Most concede they have been forced into negotiating with the graffiti artists. But they hope to achieve a separate peace.

And graffiti artists hope that this will limit their close encounters of the squad car kind. “Slick,” a Baldwin Park man who is one of the county’s premier graffiti artists, says he has never been arrested. But his partner “Risk” has seen the inside of a jail cell, he says.

“I’m too slick,” the aerosol artist jokes. “He’s a little more risky.”

Although police might see things differently, Slick’s personal experiences tell him that change is already in the air.

“A lot of times when the cops catch us, they feel uncomfortable because they can see we’re not doing graffiti like gangs,” Slick says. “We’re doing a mural. We’re doing something cool for the city.”