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Aerosol artist Jamesville teen-ager turns store walls into art. Or is it graffiti? By Daniel Gonzalez
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Jimi Hendrix lives. At least his likeness does.
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On the north wall of a mini-market on South Geddes Street, a Jamesville-DeWitt High School student breathed life into the dead rock star. Now the '60s guitar icon gazes onto Fitch Street with liquid eyes and ruby red lips puckered like a rose about to bloom.
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What is amazing, even to critics, is that a teen-ager created the 10-foot-high image with spray paint. Part outlaw, part artist, Oliver Fox has a talent for painting traffic-stopping murals. And like his father, a famous computer engineer, the 17-year-old is also a savvy entrepreneur.
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In a city struggling to overcome a reputation as an economic dinosaur, graffiti writers remain vilified vandals, even as graffiti-inspired advertisements are increasingly splashed on everything from Internet sites to Centro buses.
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Most graffiti artists work only under cover of night. But Fox takes a different approach, one that lets him paint in broad daylight and keeps him just above the law. With a portfolio of his work tucked under one arm, he strolls into small corner stores with high visibility and gives his pitch: Pay for spray paint, and I'll paint you a mural. Very often they say yes.
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He works mostly in blighted urban neighborhoods, "the ghetto" he calls it. And since October, his murals have appeared on walls in at least half a dozen city neighborhoods and on the side of a liquor store in DeWitt.
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His talents and boldness are admired and emulated by fellow aerosol artists. But the powers that be loath much of his work. The problem, they say, is that the murals Fox paints aren't really murals at all, but a cleverly disguised form of graffiti, a "piece" in street parlance. And they are out to stop him, before the trend spirals out of control.
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"Basically what he is doing is circumventing the system," said Sgt. David Pauldine, who represents the Syracuse Police Department on the Syracuse & Onondaga County Graffiti Busters Coalition, a task force dedicated to wiping out graffiti in the area.
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True murals, Pauldine said, enhance the character of a neighborhood or promote specific products. Coca-Cola, for instance, hires local graffiti artists to paint advertisements in many cities, including Syracuse.
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But the murals Fox is painting are dominated by tags, the bold, stylized lettering graffiti writers use to gain recognition among peers. Some of his characters, like Chucky, the demonic doll from the slasher movie, Child's Play, also frighten some neighborhors.
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"Some of the work is really good and you could say it's artful. ... but it's having a very negative impact on the city,"
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Pauldine said. "Lay people see that and assume there must be a gang problem."
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Fox says his work has nothing to do with gangs. His tag is ESAN, a moniker he created by experimenting with the aesthetics of different letter combinations. He paints the tag on almost all of his murals. But there is no hidden meaning buried in the wild 3-D script decipherable only to other graffiti writers.
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"I promise you it doesn't stand for anything. I promise." Fox said.
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Busy, famous dad
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His parents are divorced. His mother lives in Baldwinsville and Fox lives in Jamesville with his father, Geoffrey Fox, an internationally known computer engineer who runs Syracuse University's Northeast Parallel Architecture Center.
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But his father travels a lot, so Fox said he is free to do what he wants. In the pocket of his baggy shorts, Fox carries a cellular phone equipped with caller ID. When a friend calls, he answers fight away. But when it's his father, he ignores the call.
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Geoffrey Fox said it is true he doesn't have much time to spend with Oliver, or his other two children.
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"Yes, I'm out of town most of the time. The last two months I've probably been around 10 to 20 percent of the time," he said.
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He was unaware that his son's artwork is stirring controversy in Syracuse. But there is an upside to all that independence, he said.
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"If you read Good Parenting, I violate a lot of what's in Good Parenting. So my children are entrepreneurial as a result," he said.
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At what cost?
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Fox's art comes at the expense of a city already undergoing economic hardship, his critics say.
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"It isn't a question of art being in the eye of the beholder," said Jeff Paston, who heads the Graffiti Busters Coalition. "This affects tourism, this affects the economy and this affects real estate values."
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Like most graffiti artists, Fox got his training painting walls in hidden places - a culvert on a friend's property in Jamesville provided a great practice wall - although he won't admit to doing anything illegal.
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Then, in October, Fox and some friends got lost joy riding around the city and life changed. At the corner of Oswego and Seymour streets on the near west side, they spotted a wall on the side of La Familia grocery store and couldn't resist pulling over.
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"We were like, hey, that would make a great wall for a mural," Fox recalled.
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A few days later Fox returned with photographs of some of his artwork. In exchange for money to buy spray paint, Fox convinced the store owner to let him paint a mural. He says he borrowed the idea from some of the underground graffiti magazines he reads.
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A subculture
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When Fox gets a job, word spreads quickly through the graffiti subculture and soon a whole crew of graffiti writers is working on the same wall. When he's done, Fox photographs his work and posts the pictures on his Web site, Upstate Smiles: www.cnyisa.org/upstatestyles/index2.htm
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It is against the law for anyone under 18 to buy spray paint in Syracuse, so Fox hunts for it elsewhere. When Mr. 2nd's Bargain Outlet in North Syracuse recently received a big shipment, Fox filled up his trunk for a dollar a can.
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On a recent afternoon, Fox was working on a mural on the side of the Mount Olive mini-market on South Geddes Street. Nearby, Chris Sullivan was busy painting his tag, CIE, in bold curvy letters on the same wall. Fox met Sullivan a junior at Cicero-North Syracuse High School, at the Carousel Center. Before Fox got his driver's license, he met other graffiti writers skateboarding around Clinton Square, or hanging out on Marshall Street near Syracuse University.
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It was Regents testing time at school, but Fox wasn't interested in schoolwork. Despite all the time he devotes to the murals, Fox said he manages to remain a B-plus student. And painting murals in the city beats life in the suburbs, he said.
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"My neighborhood is boring so I just come around here," Fox said.
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To avoid breathing in fumes from the spray paint at the mini-market, he strapped a mask around his head making his face look like some sort of insect. His brown hair was short and uncombed. He hadn't shaved.
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At his feet, cans of spray paint spilled out of a plastic milk crate. A poster of Jimi Hendrix was spread out on the sidewalk and Fox was using it to paint an exact copy on the wall. To his left, Fox had already completed a Picture of a woman with flowing blond hair, a crown of flowers circling her head and the American flag superimposed down half her face. Fox borrowed that image from the CD soundtrack for the television miniseries, "The 60s," which aired in February on NBC.
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A Chucky fan
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Fox says most of his work is inspired by popular culture, or by underground comic books. He is especially fond of the horror movie character Chucky.
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Some neighbors complained to the city when Fox painted the horror movie character on the side of the Markee Cuts Barber Shop on Oswego Street. Because Fox had pennission to paint the mural, however, city officials were powerless, from stopping him. The barbershop owner wasn't so lucky. In March, city officials cited him for violatin- the city's graffiti law and asked him to paint the mural over.
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A much larger version of Chucky has re-emerged, however, on another mural on the south side of the city. Fox painted this one on the side of Renato's Pizza and Grocery Store on the comer of Midland and West Ostrander avenues. Alongside, Fox added Chucky's Bride.
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"Yeah, I sort of have a thing for Chucky," Fox said.
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Not everything Fox paints is negative. While browsing through the Syracuse University bookstore in February, Fox stumbled across a poster of two angels kissing.
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1 knew it would make a great mural," he said.
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That same day he drove to Piraino*s Country Liquors on Tecumseh Road and asked the owner if he could recreate the poster on the wall.
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"It was some really famous painting by some really famous guy," Fox said.
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The owner of the store, Butch Piraino, liked the idea and now the two angels kissing decorate the outside of his business.
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'Me poster Fox recreated on the liquor store wall turned out to be a copy of "The First Kiss," a painting by the 19thcentury French master, WilliamAdolphe Bouguereau.
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"Every year I get graffiti on the wall. Now I have nice an. The kid's got talent," Piraino said. Artistic differences
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But that kind of admiration isn't extended by the Graffiti Busters.
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Members of the coalition recently left business cards at stores around the city hoping to contact Fox. Paston located Fox and members of his crew putting the finishing touches on the mural at the Mount Olive Market on South Geddes.
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A confrontation erupted when Paston accused the graffiti writers of painting tags on the building and threatened to take them to court.
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"Honestly, you have no clue what you are talking about, I do," Fox shouted.
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Paston said the Graffiti Busters would he willing to sit down and develop some ideas for murals. But Fox and his crew don't seem ready to give up their newfound artistic freedom. At least not yet.
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"If they chip in and give us some money we'll do it," Sullivan said. "We'll do Smurfs or something like that. We'll even do Teletubbies."
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