Their Art Drives Them to the Wall : Rebels Insist That They’re Not Hoodlums Spraying Fast and Loose--That They’re ‘Creating’

Mike Krampach remembers the thrill of painting his first wall signature eight years ago, of scurrying down a concrete river embankment in Los Angeles, taking a spray-paint can and squirting the word FEAR-- the nickname he coined especially for the debut.

For a few moments, just before he ran for cover, he stood awe-struck, marveling over the swirling black letters, stark against the vast white-gray blankness.

“It was like seeing your name up in lights. You feel like on top of the world, because that’s you up there,” recalls Krampach, now 20 and living in a Cypress apartment.

Although he ended his raids on off-limits targets years ago, he hasn’t given up his spray-paint outings--or lost his zest for instant recognition.

These days, he paints big, intricately designed signature murals in legal public places--such as the seawall strip in Huntington Beach. And now his type of hard-edged, urban-core wall paintings is being dubbed by some “aerosol art.”

“Guys like us aren’t graffiti hoodlums, but most people don’t understand that,” he says. “We’re out to create. We just want to do our own thing--our kind of art.”

The graffiti-as-art phenomenon, which started on the ghetto and barrio walls and the subways of New York City in the late ‘60s and now claims Los Angeles as its western capital, has a small but thriving Orange County-based following.

But the notion that certain forms of graffiti can have redeeming qualities is usually greeted with howls of disbelief in mainstream society.

It’s easy to see why. We live in the age of graffiti blight, the days and nights of urban scrawl. The target list seems endless: buses, freeways, buildings, tunnels, billboards, signposts, pillars, doorways, sidewalks.

Tens of millions of dollars are being spent annually in Los Angeles County to clean up graffiti. Even in Orange County, where such blight is nowhere on the epidemic scale, Santa Ana spends $600,000 a year.

The magnitude of graffiti deluge, and the will-o’-the-wisp elusiveness of offenders, is underscored by the exploits of one Los Angeles youth, Daniel Ramos, suspected of leaving his CHAKA signature on a staggering scale--10,000 locations from San Francisco to Newport Beach.

And, save for an occasional community center exhibit and a few areas where graffiti-wall practitioners are openly allowed, the bulk of such markings is still done illegally and classified as public maliciousness.

As one Orange County youth, who prides himself as a true “aerosol artist,” puts it: “My mom is like most people. She believes any graffiti is defacement. Period . To her, the idea that some of it can be art is a crock.”

But urban researchers such as Devon Brewer, an anthropology graduate student at UC Irvine, argue that serious graffiti painting deserves to be studied as both a valid art form and a new street subculture.

For one thing, “aerosol art” groups generally exist apart from gangs and other violent behavior, says the 24-year-old Brewer, who has studied graffiti practitioners firsthand from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California.

While virtually all these painters are self-taught, he says, their street murals can be technically stunning and artfully sophisticated, far beyond the more primitive, regimented and turf-restricted style of “gang graffiti.”

“It’s a great mistake to assume that all graffiti is mindless and senseless,” Brewer adds, “and that the vandalism itself is the prime motive.

“These aerosol artists think of themselves as some kind of modern outlaws, but not lawbreakers in the usual sense. Their motives seem basically to be fame-seeking and artistic ones--not deliberate destruction.”

Brewer’s field research, which became the basis of a paper he wrote with Marc Miller, a University of Washington associate professor, is considered the first of its kind on the graffiti-as-art phenomenon in the West.

Although most of his original findings are keyed to the Pacific Northwest, Brewer says the patterns are similar to the aerosol art groups he has since studied in California.

Nearly all the followers are males, ranging in age from 12 to 20. Most are still inner-city blacks and Latinos, but there are increasing numbers of whites and Asians. Youths from the middle, even upper, classes are also becoming more involved.

According to leaders in the Southern California aerosol art network, there are roughly 4,500 followers in Los Angeles County. In Orange County, there are only a few score, including a 12-member group, or “crew,” that Mike Krampach helped form.

The network’s major graffiti-wall haunts are in Los Angeles, particularly the “Belmont Tunnel,” an abandoned, wall-rimmed downtown rail yard that looks like a huge pit. At such gatherings, practitioners also show off their sketchbooks, swap 8x10s of their murals or watch wall-to-wall contests between the top-notch mural painters.

Explains Rodney, 25, of Costa Mesa: “We compete, but we don’t shoot it out like a gang. We do our battles with murals and paints--that’s all.”

Most of the graffiti are still focused on the signature nickname. The simpler, stark letterings are called “tags.” “Throw-ups” are the more fanciful, multicolored ones in larger block- or sausage-shaped letters, often accompanied by personal symbols or a tiny self-portrait.

The most elaborate, colorfully explosive works are the “pieces,” or murals. These can range up to massive billboard size. Practitioners often shoot the works--dazzling, enormous, highly abstract signatures, interwoven with human figures, dragons, otherworldly creatures, urban structures and, at times, social-advocacy slogans.

Although spray-paint is the basic medium, felt-tip markers, grease pencils, paint sticks, even shoe polish, can also be used. For carving into glass surfaces, the tools are metal objects or sharp rocks.

“It doesn’t matter if they (members of the public) can read our (wall) writings or not,” says Alex Castro, 22, of Long Beach. “We speak in our own language, through our own art. Mainly, we do it for ourselves.”

Indeed, the main motive behind the graffiti, Brewer finds, is the search for fame and recognition--some of it from the public at large, but mostly from other graffiti writers. To a lesser degree are feelings of power and rebellion, he says.

Mike Krampach, recalling when he used to paint riverbank walls in Los Angeles, depicts it this way: “Some guys might do it to rebel, because it’s breaking the law and saying screw the world. But not me. I did it to get my name up, and for the adventure, the feeling of risk.”

The one other powerful motive, Brewer says, is the trait that sets these graffiti practitioners apart from all the others--the matter of their artistic exploration.

“Even if most of them are self-taught, the art is there. It’s instinctive and part of their overall youth culture,” Brewer says, adding that aerosol art is rooted in the street culture that emerged in the 1970s and includes rap music and break-dancing.

But there has been little public acceptance, network leaders say.

There have been only a handful of exhibitions for aerosol art, including some at the city-run Los Angeles Photography Center, which holds its fourth annual graffiti art show in September, and at the Homeland Neighborhood Cultural Center in Long Beach.

And, according to network leaders, there are still no legalized outdoor places for graffiti practitioners in the region. The best-known hangout, the Belmont Tunnel, is usually open to such use but has no official, lawful status.

Brewer is among those who argue that legalized spaces--where graffiti practitioners can openly develop their work and be granted certain status--could help divert many aerosol artists who now spend all their time at illegal sites.

A case in point: An unofficial project at the Huntington Beach oceanfront.

The city has yet to determine whether to designate its seawall area--which has been used for conventional murals for decades--an official public space for art. But it now permits graffiti practitioners use of some of the walls, as long as the murals are not obscene and the artists help maintain the area.

It is, local graffiti practitioners say, unique--the only freely open location for them in Orange County.

The sea breeze feels just right to Krampach and Sean Aston, 18, as they spray-paint a mural they are finishing on a seawall north of the Huntington Beach Pier.

It is a Friday morning, and there is no audience this time.

“On weekends, we usually get a bunch of people watching us in action,” Krampach says with a big grin. “They like it. They think it’s cool.”

The grin suddenly disappears. “There was this guy once, though. He came up to us and asked, ‘Are you guys a gang?’ I told him, ‘Hell no.’ But he just glared at our wall and said, ‘Well, it looks like gang graffiti to me ,’ and walked away.”

Krampach shrugs off that memory, grabs his spray can and quietly rejoins Aston at the wall.

But a few yards away, one of Krampach’s finished murals seems to say it all. Across the center he has painted a huge red-white-blue, powerfully stylized variation of his old nickname, FEAR.

And next to his wall signature, Krampach has written this message for all the passing world to see:

“This art is a reflection of the streets--the alternative to violence.”