Former Graffiti Tagger Has Designs on Third Street Promenade : With the help of a former teacher, Jose Gomez finds a legitimate venue for his art--five panels on a storefront in the popular shopping and entertainment district.

A few years back, Jose Gomez was adorning hundreds of walls, fences and street signs in Santa Monica, West Los Angeles and elsewhere with his spray-painted trademark signature, “Prism.”

Today, Gomez is again leaving paint in public places but in a decidedly more legitimate fashion. The 19-year-old artist has been commissioned by the city of Santa Monica to paint five large panels on a storefront along the Third Street Promenade.

The transition from graffiti tagger to artist was a gradual one. Gomez started painting graffiti when he was about 13, and he was soon emptying two spray-paint cans a day--usually stolen, he said. He’d walk down the aisle of a paint store several times a week, “sliding a few cans up my jacket sleeves--easy.”

For awhile, his numerous silver-and-black or silver-and-blue graffiti tags earned him some standing among his peers. But before long, he said, he got less of a charge out of each “Prism” he sprayed--and began hungering for something permanent and substantial.

“I wanted to put up something that would last, not just get whitewashed off,” Gomez recalled. “My parents and friends had been encouraging me to draw ever since I was a kid.

“They always told me I had talent, (and when) you got talent, it makes you feel better,” he said. “You know you can do something right.”

But bringing that talent to bear on his graffiti was where the trouble started. Creating true graffiti art takes careful planning, up to 20 different colors of spray-paint and several hours of on-site work.

And, of course, there is the problem of finding a surface to paint. Unless it’s a surface the painter has permission to work on, it must be sufficiently out of public view to allow time to paint.

Soon, Gomez’s preoccupation with creating more lasting works, together with the worries every teen-ager has while growing up, started taking a toll. By his mid-teens, Gomez was dozing through classes or skipping school for days at a time.

But Gomez got lucky. He ended up at Olympic High School, the alternative school in Santa Monica sometimes called “Last Chance High.” There he became a protege of Bruria Finkel, then artist-in-residence at the school and now chairwoman of the Santa Monica Arts Commission.

Finkel was already impressed with graffiti as an art form and had reserved a wall on school grounds for her students. The resulting works were not only legal, but their merits were discussed and appraised by students and faculty.

She quickly recognized Gomez’s talent, and he became Olympic’s rising star. He also learned to branch out into other mediums, such as acrylics.

“When he painted a rose,” Finkel recalled, “he captured not only the rose, but its very soul.”

Flash-forward three years.

Although Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade has been a success, the recession has created some significant vacancies along the three-block pedestrian mall; one of the largest is at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard, the Promenade’s northern gateway.

Promenade officials worried that the vacant storefront was pulling down the area’s spirit, and its size made remote the prospect of renting it out quickly.

Tom Carroll, executive director of the Bayside District Corp., which oversees redevelopment of the Promenade, turned to Finkel for help. Did she know anyone who could help make an abandoned building look good?

Finkel had left Olympic High, but she had hardly forgotten her star student. She asked Gomez if, for $1,000 in materials and labor, he would paint five panels of the storefront that face the Promenade.

Gomez, now a high school graduate and a Salvador Dali fan, promptly assembled a crew of friends and went to work on the 8 1/2-by-12-foot panels.

Gomez had never worked on quite this scale with acrylics. Graffiti art’s strong use of color demands a larger canvas, but acrylics work best in a smaller, more detailed form that requires “a lot more work,” Gomez said.

The subject matter also was more complex--a tree in hilly country, through the seasons.

Still, this was a chance to express himself--and express himself he has done, weekend after weekend, panel after panel.

Reviewing the work in progress, Carroll said he was “delighted.”

Finkel said her former star pupil’s success has inspired her to push forward one of her own dreams: Now in the works is a city-sponsored graffiti art contest for the huge wall facing Pacific Coast Highway and the beach at the bottom of the California Incline.