Paintedbus Artwerks: Mural Slam 5!

During my final Fall semester @ CCSU, I took a mural painting class and ended up helping organize the 1st Mural Slam. The idea behind it was to provide a non-competitive painting atmosphere where all mural painting styles were encouraged and celebrated. This attracted not only a lot of traditional brush and canvas type painters, but also allowed a safe haven for graffiti artists to practice their art in a police free and legal area. It was well attended and a good time was had by many.

After graduating, I was happy to see that the slam was continued by the following mural classes led by Prof. Mike Alewitz. I did my best to attend as many as I could manage and found that it was a good way to introduce many of my friends to the joy of large scale painting.

However, I did miss the 4th event due to the fact that I was in Northern California painting a mural. The way I figure it, I spent 3 weeks painting out there and that qualifies as a perfectly legitimate excuse!

So on Saturday I was pretty excited to see a lot of my old friends and spend the day painting. However, I immediately noticed that many of the outstanding graffiti writers who had attended the previous events were not present. After asking around, I found out that during the previous slam a journalist had interviewed many of the writers for a story about the slam.

Well as it turned out, the journalist was an under cover cop and busted a whole bunch of them for other work they had done around the city. Aside from the fact that it may have been a little foolish for these guys to be giving out their personal info, I feel that the police were WAY out of line. I don't really care how others may feel about the graffiti issue, but the way I see it is that this is a SCHOOL SPONSORED EVENT and for the police to approach these guys ON SCHOOL GROUNDS and ultimately undercut the entire point of the mural slam is not only rude to the event organizers, school and attendees, but also a prime example of cowardice on their part.

My only hope is that these graffiti writers will attend again in the future and wont be so foolish as to allow this to happen again. Don't give out your info, and perhaps, try writing some other letters. We want you there, but we certainly don't want to jeopardize your livelihood in the process.

...anyway.

Here is my contribution for this year. We were supposed to paint in the allotted 8 hours, but I took 13 and finished under the lights of my beetle. Its a tribute to naturalist John Muir who was the 1st president of the sierra club, encouraged President Teddy Roosevelt to create the first national Parks and was just an all around cool dude. Enjoy!

(Click images to zoom)

around 10am