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Hip-Hop Collective graffitis Gainesville
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Beads of sweat drip down his face and his short, brown hair clings to his skin. He reaches out a shamrock-tattooed arm to swat at a love bug flying by. His dirty sneakers scuff the ground as he treks across the faded cement.
He turns to his group of friends.
“Hey, did you bring any of that ballet slipper?” Stephen Rockwood asks around to a sidewalk lined with six sleeveless, sweating guys. “Dude, that’s an awesome color, that ballet slipper.”
On an early Saturday morning, six members of the University of Florida’s Hip-Hop Collective group gather by the Gainesville 34th Street wall to practice graffiti. But while most people painting the wall on a Saturday morning scrawl out happy birthday messages, these guys are sweating it out just for the sake of their art. One can be sure they are the only group of painters this morning with more than 400 different tips used to spray out their collection of more than 30 different colors of spray paint stacked up in crates by the sidewalk.
“If I had to have one tip forever, I’d have to have New York thin,” says Hip-Hop Collective Vice President Andreas Zori, considering the versatility of its lines.
Graffiti artists used to take caps off of everything from starch cans to whipped cream to PAM spray. Easy Cheese nozzles make an especially good, fat line. When all the caps went missing off of certain brands at the grocery stores, however, manufacturers took notice and started making them incompatible with spray paint cans.
Eventually, it became a big enough industry to just produce tips directly for the spray cans. New York and German tips both are made with a thin and fat version, and the artists switch their tips back and forth between the different colors they use.
After switching tips, the guys along 34th Street have to spray their paint out into the air to get the color flowing, adding more and more layers of fumes into the already thick, humid Gainesville air.
Some wear small doctors’ masks around their noses and mouths to protect from the fumes. But those who spend more time up close, often blowing on their pieces frantically, take more extreme measures with their gear. Gas masks adorn their faces, adding a surreal feeling to the sunny, summer day.
Hunching close to the wall, Rockwood blows at the fat, purple lines he sprays into his piece. “It makes it not drip,” he says. “Drips look like shit.” He points to a glitch in his design, which spells out Sinka. “See that one? Yeah, I didn’t blow it.”
Rockwood nearly always writes Sinka, but sometimes uses different colors or styles than the bold, dark look he chooses to work with today. Most artists pick a certain word or phrase to gain notoriety with name recognition. If Rockwood was to write something besides Sinka, underneath the piece he would probably write “by Sinka,” in a less detailed, more haphazard style than the elaborate piece itself. Similar to a signature, these “tags” sign off on their works.
Down the row, huge words – some indiscernible and some not – take form on the wall in front of each artist. Before Sinka there is Air, Egofly and Destroy, a purposefully dripping piece in black and white. Zes comes next (there is not enough room at the end for the “t”), followed by Etoh.
“It’s chemistry jargon,” explains Zori, a chemistry major in a torn-up, sweat-stained shirt, about his unpronounceable piece.
Hearing screams at the end of the line, all heads turn to the Air piece. But no blood splattered, no toes are run over by passing cars, and no artists passed out from the fumes. Instead, one of the sprays is dripping.
“That wind!” exclaims Rockwood.
“Yeah, it feels so good!” says Zori.
“Nah, man. It’s blowin’ my shit!” replies Rockwood.
Love bugs dance perilously close to the freshly painted walls. Cars racing by pause to honk, and people cruising up the sidewalk on bikes stop for a chat with the guys.
“Ooh, Mimosa!” says one of the artists as he discovers a bottle of his desired color.
Late at night, before the Saturday paint session, a few members came out to buffer the walls by painting them a solid color: pink. But this week, more budding artists turned out than expected, and more wall space had to be rollered off with yellow paint. Not to mention amateur graffiti artists beat the Hip-Hop Collective to one of their buffered wall panels already, spraying crude pictures and sayings onto the pink wall.
Losing wall space is a bummer for these guys, whose painting area is extremely limited already.
“The police have come when we had a bunch of people out there saying, ‘We had a report that a bunch of people are painting obscenities on the wall,’” Zori says. He tried to explain that their pieces were art. “One of the guys had tagged ‘get off my dick’ and the cop was like, ‘Well what’s that, then?’ He said the next time we had to get a permit.”
A far cry from the crude symbols taking over their buffered space, many of these artists even have sketches already planned out for their elaborate wall pieces. Black books containing graffiti sketches already made lay propped open beside the artists’ feet.
“It’s like a practice tool, but if there’s a piece you want to paint you bring it out there – it’s almost like a blueprint,” says artist Gary McClain. “You can do it anywhere. I’ll be in class or waiting at the bus stop; you never have to worry about loose paper.”
Perfecting spraying techniques, however, cannot be done anywhere. All of the artists out at the wall consider themselves beginners, though some have had more practice than others. While they walk around offering each other comments about how to make a piece “shine,” they teach each other techniques not learnable with paper and pens. What these guys really need most of is actual, outdoor practice – something the city tries to limit.
“The City Beautification Board aims for greater beautification of the City of Gainesville, so it wants to avoid walls for graffiti in general,” says Chair of the Board Anita Spring in an e-mail. “It does recognize that the 34th Street wall is a student tradition.”
The City Beautification Board of Gainesville recently wrote a letter to commissioners stating that “we believe it might be possible to eliminate the potential for graffiti problems by installing a one-foot-wide soil planting area at the base of retaining walls to allow for the planting of ficus vines or ivy that would eventually cover the wall.”
“They don’t think people will pull it down if they’re trying to paint?” responds Zori to this idea. “God, bureaucrats are retarded.”
In the meantime, the members of Hip-Hop Collective count on the fact that police officers tend to look the other way when it comes to the 34th Street wall. Instead of fearing the law, for now they only fear the shakiness of their own hands.
“I’m scared,” Rockwood confesses as he approaches his piece with a black spray can. “This is what really screws it up – the outline.”
He stands below his piece to blow desperately at the outline he just painted.
Graffiti artists paint an initial outline first and once done with the piece they painstakingly paint the final outline, carefully attempting not to ruin the whole work with one sloppy mistake.
Crisp and thin outlines look the best, and the artists struggle to achieve this ideal.
Screwing up at the last minute on his outline, no longer crisp or thin, Zori feels down on himself and his ETOH piece on the wall. But running across the street and dodging traffic, two girls set out to restore his confidence. Holding out a canvas, they ask if he could paint something for their friend’s birthday. After careful consideration and help from the group, a swirling, purple creation takes its place on the canvas. The word reads “Passion.”
“Yeah man,” Rockwood tells his bandana-clad friend, checking out the finished canvas. “That looks pretty.”