The first thing I really excelled at was shoplifting.

You take the risk to try something for the first time for the thrill of it.

You get away with it, and before you know it becomes a habit.

Of course, I knew it was wrong, but like all things naughty, they can be exciting, so we proceed.

It took nearly two years for the project to come to fruition, but it finally happened; I painted a mural with a group of inmates from Florence Prison Camp outside of the prison walls in the town of Canon City.  As a group project, we painted a 45-foot long mural inside of the Prison Museum.  Working on this project was the incredibly fulfilling and also an educational experience like none I have had.  Spending a total of six days with the guys, we accomplished an impressive mural to the benefit of the public.

Guns, drugs, anti-authoritarian dragons give chase, destruction, death, and peace.  Spray paintings, clouds of smoke, the rumble of the bass, the broken window trespassing, dark figures in the alley.  These are elements of events that occurred this week, in an alley and on a wall, with my main man Vogey.

Pull the blade, reveal the shank, grasp the shiv, unsheathe the knife, prepare for penetration; behind, behind, further behind, all the way back, the furthest way around. Sting, burn, drip, drip, drip goes the blood. The tip enters, thoughts occur, feelings follow. The pain, the deepest feelings. The out of sight slicing, cutting, slashing, sticking, shanking, the stabbing in the back.

The Construction of a cardboard village had my mind running, my imagination turning. First, the excitement of making new things and then the sadness of the state of our community would come to mind.  From seeing all the trash that we discard daily, to confronting issues of use and re-use, and each of our “places” in society.  Building cardboard houses most notably lead me to think about homelessness.

Cardboard dwelling of the darkest figures in a part of town that you might not want to wander through by happenstance.  The dark alley’s, the graffiti, the buff squad, the war on free speech vs. […]

Stealing the magic of our days this little thief appears out of thin air.  Taking our days and our nights and making our time worth less than the breaths we forget each day. Depression, anxiety, stress, all these names, perhaps one monster, perhaps many.  All the forms of darkness take one form and take the forms of many.

Up in the sky, through days and across the night, these winged creatures dominate the skies. All shapes and sizes, interacting with the wind in such a fashion as to experience a freedom that few humans can or could ever understand.

Look… Look Closer…

The Villagers are there along with rising and setting of the sun and the moon in a cycle of light and dark.

When the worlds get reversed and the daydream walkers sleep and the night walkers begin to rise. The underworld becomes the outer-world as the dream world washes over. DMT trips silence the sight, and the Devils run free.

This city has characters that live in the shadows

While you were sleeping the nightmares showed up.

When our eyes were closed the monsters moved in.

Our village is consumed with terror.

We are the villagers, and we must wake up.

We must arise.

It’s in the places that we don’t look, at the times when we can’t see that the darkness has set in. We pretend it’s fake like it’s invisible like it’s not real.  We wait for a source of light to manifest and remove these evils, but it never comes.  Not in years of waiting

Pueblo Colorado is our Village. “The Village Walls” is a public art project in which numerous murals will be painted throughout the city. The goal of the project is to address many of our cities […]