Artistic License

His tag is “Cable.” Maybe you’ve seen it--sharp black lines hastily etched on storefront windows, MTA buses, billboards declaring his fame high above flowing traffic.

Cable was arrested in January (literally red-handed--he was holding a spray-paint can) and spent nine days scrubbing walls. Since then he says he’s been “strictly legit,” scrawling loopy pictures in notebooks and on discarded plywood.

So Cable, a Van Nuys resident who asked not to be identified by his real name, could barely contain his excitement when Highland High School in Palmdale gave him and a few other would-be vandals an opportunity to help paint a mural on the ROTC’s portable classroom wall.

“This is better,” he says, shaking a clicking can of Krylon aerosol paint. “You can really take your time and practice. You’re not always running from the cops.”

The mural depicts a jet fighter in flight bordered by a golden eagle on one side and the ROTC bulldog patch on the other. A crew of about five, all students at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, worked on the project all day Friday.

Herbert Guerra, a 20-year-old art student at Cal State Northridge, sketches the drawing in chalk and guides the work of his proteges. He styles himself a muralist but does not mind being called a graffiti artist or tagger--it’s all about expression, he says.

Like Cable, Guerra only does sanctioned work. At Birmingham, his alma mater, he adorned the counseling office with a human figure holding a brain and a heart in his hands to signify intellect and emotion. Guerra has also painted murals at CSUN.

Guerra says his art is fueled by a potent mixture of traditional Latino mural painting, formal art training and hip-hop--especially hip-hop.

“I don’t write poetry,” he says. “I write images.”

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Miguel Rios, a security officer at Highland High School, said he has often caught kids spray-painting or marking on school walls and thought the mural would be a good way to channel their creativity in a positive direction. He supervised the painting Friday, occasionally advising his young artists to “tone down the flames” or to mix the colors better.

“This is like preventive medicine,” Rios says. “You can give kids something they like to do and steer them in a positive way. All kids want to be recognized for doing something good.”

Rios, who also works as a cashier at a San Fernando Valley grocery store, found the talent needed to carry out his plan in Ahmad Nasseri, a 16-year-old bag boy at the market. Ahmad knew the rest of the crew Friday from high school, where he and his buddies share sketchbooks and techniques.

Ahmad says legal tagging is superior to illicit drawing on public spaces because sanctioned images last longer and can be more openly displayed. It’s also a good way to stay out of trouble.

“I don’t want to do the illegal stuff because of all the gangs and all,” he says. Many Los Angeles gangs have subsets of graffiti vandals.

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Ahmad says he wants to finish high school and study computer graphics in college. Another muralist wants to be an animator.

Cable, a teenager with furtive eyes, says he is “inactive” for now but didn’t rule out returning to the streets. His tag name doesn’t mean anything, he says.

“But I liked the way I wrote it--I could put style into it,” he says.

On busy days, he would scrawl his tag dozens--maybe hundreds--of times on buses from Van Nuys to Santa Monica.

“Everybody rides the buses,” he says.

Once he crawled up to a blank billboard over 7th Street and Western Avenue in Koreatown.

“It’s about how much fame you can get in one day,” he says. “It’s like running for president--instead of Bush and Gore, I put Cable One.”