The Seeker

Paint brush graffiti.


When I was a kid, I spent a few years growing up on the East Side of Buffalo on Kuchuska (sp?) Street living with my folks in my Dad's Dad's house prior to packing up (at the age of 3) and moving to Tonawanda. We still went to my Mom's parents home on Beck Street every Sunday afternoon, until we took up the family camping trend in the mid Seventies and we split town every weekend for such faraway lands as Darien and Niagara Falls.

My grandparents home was across the street from the back parking lot of some department stores. The back wall of the store had this awesome paint-brush rendered graffiti that was there until the knocked the building down to build a (big K) K-mart. Not out-of-a-can sprayed, but authored with a brush. I could always picture this rockin' long haired East Side Pole-- a braver, more vandal-happy version of myself-- with a bucket of white paint and a fat 'ol brush scrawling this Who-based sentiment: Keith Moon Lives.

In the world of Krylon-applied tags, this brush scrawl stood out in my mind. Hey, I was a teenager and I loved the Who! You could tell the artist started to speed things up when they got to the end, the 'es' in 'lives'... maybe the cops were coming! It is harder to run with a gallon of house paint than a can of spray-paint! But the artist did take the time to add the 'eyes' or 'boobs' or whatever is in the O's in 'MOON.' What a skilled craftsman!

I found this picture in the flat-file cleaning mentioned earlier. I had used this as an submission to a college photography class where we were all given 5-6 phrases and were instructed to go out and photograph images that we felt represented the words. This one was for "scholarly communication."