He also makes painterly works out of the small colored flags that mark underground wires and pipelines.
"I'm creating new things in the world, new orientations, new contexts."
I Love You Baby served up this treat for passersby on
Montrose.
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Lawndale's Sprawl is but one example of how the local street art community is becoming more organized. During a recent festival at Project Row Houses, several artists swapped work and ideas at the "Dumpster Hub," a revamped trash bin made to look like the inside of a living room. And in Austin, Zarathustra James is running a clearinghouse through his Web site, Bomit.com.
"I have been mailing out tons of stickers and graffiti- or stencil-related packets for three years now," says the 33-year-old artist.
"It is an answer to the constantly increasing number of metal surfaces in our cities," he says. "There are too many of these that keep appearing which seem to be purposely put there by the government to look ugly. If there is a graffiti tag or sticker or stencil on that electrical box…at least it makes you think."
This distribution method allows artists to have their work displayed in cities around the world. It also helps them skirt serious trouble with the law. Say an officer catches an artist in the act of putting up a poster or a sticker; the police would have major difficulties connecting that work to all the other ones around town, since the artist can say he got that particular piece from Bomit.com -- and has no idea who put up the other ones.
This is part of the reason why most street artists run in packs. Working in a group helps dilute accountability. And it never hurts to have someone watching your back.
CRÜZ is part of a collective called the Guys from California. None of its members hail from the Golden State. They are all Anglo or Hispanic men in their twenties. And yes, some of them have had their work shown in traditional galleries.
"We operate as a collective and share ideas, as well as printing costs and a truck," says CRÜZ. "It generally works better when you have some kind of crew or, as the academy likes to refer to it, collective. It's essentially like a superhero team. Everybody's got a special trait."
The works by the Guys from California are all over the map, both literally and figuratively. Stylized flyers created with graphics software, intricate two-page drawings, floating celebrity heads, simple chess pieces -- these are but a few of the works on paper presented by the collective.
The Houston Press tagged along with CRÜZ and his cohorts one night as they pasted up some flyers. It was like watching a terrorist cell of slackers:
A truck pulls up to an intersection. Out hop CRÜZ and two others, all dressed in dark clothing. The truck rolls on, circling the block. The three men trot up to a metal box and set up shop.
"All clear?" asks CRÜZ.
"One sec," says the lookout on his right.
A solitary sedan cruises past in the night.
The world can be very quiet once you start listening.
"Do it," says the lookout on the left.
As CRÜZ brushes a layer of paste on the box, some of it flips in the air and hits one of his accomplices.
"Dude!" exclaims the victim.
CRÜZ apologizes and keeps working. He sticks a flyer on the paste and brushes over it. Their work here is done.
The truck rolls up. The men are gone.
On any given Wednesday at Commerce Street Artists Warehouse, a half-dozen men and women jockey for space in front of a large canvas. They paint their own doodads, dripping colors all over one another. Sometimes these disparate ideas gel into a frenetic masterpiece full of wacky themes and cartoon characters, but a lot of times the whole thing just becomes an outright mess.
Such is the creative process of the I Love You Baby collective. Many of its members are professional artists with their own projects, but come Wednesday, everyone's just looking to have a good time. It's refreshing to paint without design. Plus there's usually a lot of beer in the studio.
"I like the thought of 10,000 different ideas trying to develop one concept," says 39-year-old Will Bentsen of ILYB.
One of the cardinal rules of the collective is that you can't get upset if someone paints over your work.
"It's hard for every one of us to let go at certain points," he says. "When someone paints over something you like, it's easy to get irritated, but we have to live by that rule."
And the ILYB rule applies to street art as well. Once an artist decides to slap his work up in public, everything's game. It's going to peel; people are going to put stuff on top it; it might be gone the next day. Street art is about letting go.
I Love You Baby recently created and distributed a bunch of madcap lost-and-found flyers, some of which were submitted to Lawndale's 'zine.
"Will [Bentsen] did all those on his computer in one night," says 33-year-old Paul Kremer. "There was a constant stream of flyer after flyer, and they kept on getting funnier."
