Graffiti Artist Wants Legal Walls to Come Down : Lecture: Raul Gamboa, in talk in Santa Ana, says municipal aerosol art programs would provide an outlet for creativity.

Dressed in a black baseball cap, black T-shirt and shorts, Raul Gamboa didn’t much look like a seasoned expert on one of the art world’s hottest topics. But he’s helping to write the book on the subject--with spray paint.

Gamboa, whose cap read “Graffiti Lives,” came here Monday to assert that the big, brilliantly colored letters he leaves on freight cars, buildings and freeway retaining walls are an art form, not mere vandalism. The distinction has been the focus of growing debate that has temperatures rising across Southern California.

“If you call it art, it’s art,” Gamboa, 25, said during a lecture at Rancho Santiago College. “Who’s an authority to say what’s art and what is not? It’s like saying I don’t like the way you dress or cut your hair or paint your house.”

All graffiti are against the law, and Gamboa knows it. He readily admits that about 80 of the 100 murals he’s completed this year were done illegally (the rest were done with permission or by request), and he says that can be part of the thrill.

“I’m not saying illegal graffiti is right,” he said. He just wants people to hear his point of view and to try to understand graffiti artists, whose work can be found everywhere from Huntington Beach to Germany, where it can be seen on fragments of the fallen Berlin Wall.

The real point, he said, is that “it’s important to be able to create.”

Most of the murals Gamboa has done are in Los Angeles, where city officials are working to develop a clear division between so-called aerosol art and such spray can vandalism as the simple black letters by which gangs mark their territory. The officials hope to provide legal spaces and programs for street artists.

Similarly, Huntington Beach officials expect by early next month to propose a program that would allow graffiti art on the retaining walls that stretch along the beach north of the pier. The project would include a cleanup plan for graffiti that people would deem unsightly.

Gamboa, who lives in Glendale, explained that his “art is contained in the shape of the letters,” whether fat and puffy, sharply angular and slanted, sprayed in bright day-glo or colored in paler shades. He often paints names of friends, such as one who was killed while working on a mural by a gang who mistook the boy for a rival gang member.

He said it was that kind of jolting experience that made him an advocate for municipal aerosol art programs.

“Lots of people ignore community problems (but) the answer is getting involved in your community or creating programs” so that youths don’t have to resort to illegal activity, he said.

“There’s no way you’re going to stop graffiti. There’s always going to be someone who wants to express (himself) that way and wants to reach a lot of people.” And “when there aren’t any places for these kids to paint, (they) have to do it illegally.”

One woman said she was “offended” that Gamboa would call for legalized spaces when he continues to break the law, thereby acting as a negative role model.

“Just because I do it illegally, does that mean every kid has to do it illegally?” he replied. “Now, without legal programs, they can’t choose right from wrong. . . . Give them a choice.”

Gamboa thinks such programs would have appeal even though they would strip away graffiti’s outlaw lure. Not everyone is drawn to the clandestine, illegal aspects of the practice, he said, and besides, providing a creative outlet is what matters.

He recalled growing up in a household where his alcoholic father beat his mother until they divorced. He said he involved himself in everything from graffiti writing in the dead of night to breaking into homes in broad daylight. Graffiti was “an outlet of all the anger and rage” he felt inside.

But eventually, he “found the strength in my mind to draw myself out of all of that,” and while he continues to do illegal spray-can work (he has said he just can’t resist the promise of a nice white wall), he has been exhibiting in galleries and recently started making money with his art. He has painted signs for 7-Eleven stores, created murals for other businesses and now is working on stage scenery for a UC Irvine production of “West Side Story” at the Irvine Barclay Theatre next month.

At least two in the crowd of about 30 at the lecture seemed to get the picture Gamboa was attempting to paint. “His work is different from what I think of as graffiti,” said one woman who wouldn’t give her name. “This is art as far as I’m concerned.”

“I will now look at this with a different eye,” said Russell Ludwick of Fullerton. “Graffiti is not such a pejorative term.”