Missoula graffiti art fades to gray

It’s a frigid November afternoon. Strong winds pull falling snow in one direction then another, making the sting a little sharper. “The Greyman” walks across McCormick Park holding a long pole with a paint roller attached to the end. He’s done this enough that he knows to wear his green parka.

He reaches the south side of the Orange Street Bridge and walks under, escaping the snow as he looks for something to paint. The Greyman, 54, takes a peanut from his jacket pocket and breaks it open with one hand, popping the tiny morsels into his mouth as he scans the bridge’s cement belly.

“There’s a tag,” he said, and treks up the steep retaining wall to the bridge. He paints over a small patch of graffiti staining the cement, leaving behind only a gray rectangle of paint. Looking around, gray rectangles splotch the cement structure; some are the size of notebooks but others equal full-size mattresses.

“I’ll paint over graffiti one day and come back later to see they left me messages like ‘Take this Greyman,’” he said. “I paint over that, too.”

The Greyman hasn’t always been known as such, but Missoula graffiti artists, whom he’s never met, started leaving messages for “The Greyman” a few years ago, he said. He wants to keep it that way, fearing if some knew his identity they might retaliate against him.

“Sometimes big players come through town who take graffiti very seriously,” he said, “and they don’t want others covering up their tags.”

For that reason, the Greyman only paints during early afternoon hours or in the morning “when they’re still in the sack,” he said.

The Greyman is part of the Missoula Police Department’s Anti-Graffiti Task Force that rids the city of illegal graffiti on public property – bridges, walls, street lamps and sidewalks – and private property – businesses, houses and even cars. Property owners call police, who document the graffiti and see if it’s gang related, said Crime Prevention Officer Rob Scheben. They then call the Greyman.

“About 98 percent of the graffiti is done by kids just messing around,” Scheben said.

The Greyman isn’t paid. He’s been volunteering for 12 years, he said. People donate to the Task Force, and money is sometimes taken from the police budget to pay for paint and supplies, Scheben said.

“We try to be frugal,” Scheben said, “but unfortunately it does add up a little bit.”

The Greyman moved to Missoula in 1991 and noticed graffiti around town. The police weren’t doing much to combat it, so the Greyman grabbed some paint and handled it himself, he said. Eventually, he and the police got together and established the Anti-Graffiti Task Force. This year, the Greyman has tackled at least 100 graffiti sites in Missoula, Scheben said. In 2006, he eradicated 190 sites, more than the five previous years combined, reported a police newsletter. Scheben said Missoula police have arrested many people for illegal graffiti, mostly kids, but he doesn’t know the exact number.

Some artists around town, like Marc Moss, see graffiti as art, not vandalism, and argue that graffiti should be legal, provided it’s not vulgar or on private property like houses and businesses.

“Painting in alleys or public space, I think that’s fine,” Moss said.

Graffiti artists in Missoula are self-policing and paint over vulgar or hateful messages, Moss said.

“You don’t see the hate stick around very long,” he said.

He said graffiti is a great way to get to know a town.

Most of Missoula’s graffiti is pleasant, positive art that “creates discussion in the community,” he said. For example, there’s a stencil of Dick Cheney with the words “Dick Cheney is watching you” painted in front of Liquid Planet, he said, adding that the Greyman’s efforts were wasted.

“The Anti-Graffiti Task Force is fighting a losing battle,” Moss said.

A 15-year-old graffiti artist, who goes by Echo, said graffiti should be illegal because if it weren’t, “the world would look like crap. Kids would just be out painting all over the place.”

Echo was arrested about two years ago one early morning when he and a friend were painting a wall, he said. As punishment, he had to clean the wall.

Now, Echo only paints on the free wall at the south side of the California Street Bridge and usually paints faces and other creatures, he said. Landowner Dan Tabish erected the free wall to give painters a legal place to work.

Echo said making even more places legal to paint wouldn’t solve the problem.

“It’s almost a tradition to do it illegally,” Echo said. “Adrenaline gets the blood flowing.”

The Greyman knows he’ll never stop graffiti for that reason, he said. But if he didn’t paint over it, Missoula would be covered one end to the other in six months, he said.

He carries his roller and bucket of gray paint to the same places every week under the bridges at Orange Street and Madison Street and areas along the Kim Williams Trail.

“It’s all taken care of until the next time a few days later,” he said. “There’s 120 layers (of paint) in some places under the Orange Street Bridge.”

Most of Missoula’s graffiti is tags, which are artist’s pseudonyms, like “TASK,” “DRAM” and “SEAM,” the Greyman said. He doesn’t mind graying over these splotches of paint but winces when he has to cover some of the work.

“I do have admiration for some of their artwork,” he said, adding that he liked a life-size chalk painting of human figures on the retaining wall beneath the Madison Street Bridge a while back.

“They told me to cover it up, so I had to,” the Greyman said.

Another painting over the footbridge at Madison Street caught the Greyman’s eye. Someone stencil-painted “HAPPY” in big, green letters along with a few dinosaurs.

“It’s nothing gang-related,” the Greyman said. “It’s not vulgar. It’s happy, like it said, but we have to remove it.”

It’s not always that easy to cover spray paint or coax it off with thinner, he said.

“They’re starting to use paints that bleed through the latex paint I use,” the Greyman said.

He sometimes needs a ladder and a friend to reach graffiti on trellises and bridges.

“Some of these kids get pretty creative on where they paint,” Scheben said, “hoping he (the Greyman) won’t be able to reach it.”

Ironically enough, the vandals often use the clean, gray areas he’s painted as their canvases.

Echo has never seen the Greyman wielding his paint roller, but “once kids put anything up, he’ll come and paint over it,” Echo said.

“I once left a message for him after he covered something on the free wall that took me all day,” Echo said. “A week later it was painted over.”

The Greyman said, “It’s just a little game we play.”