A few years ago, not long after I started painting stencils on the street, the local council began a zero-tolerance crackdown on graffiti. Suddenly my work started disappearing within days of going up. In response I started painting famous classical images like Michelangelo’s David sculpture. ‘How could they deny the artistic value of this?’ I thought. But they persisted and most of my work is now just a memory. My experience is not at all unique, graffiti artists around the world suffer at the hands of the buff monster. While we’re at home cleaning paint off our fingernails, he plods around methodically eliminating the traces we left behind the night before.
Last year on Good Friday I painted another Michelangelo, his ‘Pieta’ sculpture that resides in the Vatican, on the side of the Salvation Army charity shop. I hoped that by doing an image so blatantly associated with mainstream art that the council would leave it alone. I was wrong, it was gone within two weeks. This year I have done another stencil relevant to Good Friday, and this time the council can’t fucking touch it.
I like my stencils to become part of the environment I put them in and often make a stencil to fit a particular place. The bricked-up archway on St Philips Church interested me, so I decided to ask the vicar if I could paint it. I contacted revd. Stewart Taylor via his email listed on the church website and to my great surprise he liked my work and was keen on the idea. Over the months I worked on several designs and we eventually settled on Salvador Dali’s Christ.
With written permission in my pocket, I donned my luminous yellow jacket and painted the piece in broad daylight on a busy street. Busloads of people gawked, teenagers pointed, and a couple of hobos waited to see the result as I peeled the stencil off the wall.
Good Friday 2006 began with a ‘walk of witness’, local Christians walked along Mill Road holding colourful flags behind a man dressed as Jesus carrying a wooden cross. At the end of their journey they stopped next to the covered painting. Before the grand unveiling the church curate, Revd. Dr Richard Higginson, had a few things to say:
“I have long had a sneaking admiration for stencil artists. I feel that the art they do is not fully appreciated and wish there were more public places where their art was welcome. So when Maya came forward with a suggestion for a piece of art which would fill the archway on this wall, we were delighted to respond positively. I like it because it serves to remind us how Christ didn’t just die in the world, he died for the world.”
Currently the council in Cambridge, and councils elsewhere across Britain, offer a free graffiti removal service and proudly announce their statistics as proof that they care for the environment. In my eyes this is pure insanity. When future generations look back centuries from now they’ll lament the loss of all the amazing graffiti and say how primitive our society was to allow such a thing. I want my work to encourage the people with power to rethink the role of graffiti art in our public spaces. My dream is to turn the city’s streets into an open art gallery, not just for commissioned artists, but for anyone who wants to share their work in public.
Maya.