Brian Kosoff
During 2020, with our gym closed during the Covid Pandemic, my wife and I took long walks through Portland for exercise. It was also during the Black Lives Matter protests and the explosion of graffiti downtown. It forced me to notice graffiti instead of merely accepting it as part of the usual Portland environment.
It was on one of our walks where I first took serious note of how property owners attempted to paint over graffiti on the walls of their buildings. Now I assume this graffiti was not one of the many beautiful murals that one can see on many walls in Portland, but were of somewhat less merit. Maybe they were obscene, maybe they were too political, or maybe the property owner just thought them ugly. I certainly hope they were not some beautiful work of art now lost to us all.
In their attempt to remove what they saw as a blight on their property the owners or their employees simply painted over them. Given the lack of any attempt to match the original color of the walls I had to assume they used whatever paint they had on hand, or the cheapest color paint they could buy. Further it seemed like often there was little design thought made to cover up the graffiti with a pleasing shape, it was not an artistic or even aesthetic intent on the owner's part, purely a utilitarian one.
But to my eye what resulted from this unintended collaboration between graffiti artist and property owner was a new piece of art. An abstract expressionist painting! To me the end result was far more meritorious than the original blank wall would have been. A drab brick or concrete wall now alive with color or composition.
I have chosen to capture many of these collaborations before they disappear, because as surely as graffiti artists will will come along and see these new patches of color as fresh canvas, the property owners will respond, and the creation of new work will continue.