Graffiti Writer Nite Owl Paints a Piece

Описание: I met Nite Owl after a trip into an underground tunnel in the East Bay. The walls of a massive drainage tunnel were covered in graffiti for miles. Inside, I found a piece by Nite Owl. It was his signature owl, but distorted like a grotesque mutation. It was beautiful work, but the next time I entered the tunnels, it was covered by a manic amateur tag.

“It hurts when that happens, but that’s just part of the game,” said Nite Owl. “Nobody asked me to put it there, I can’t get too upset if someone comes and takes it off.”

Nite Owl’s work appears all over the world. A former architect-turned street-artist, Nite Owl makes a living selling art directly to clients. He says it took him about 10 years to build his local reputation and develop a client base.

I met Nite Owl at his studio in Oakland. Yellow owl-eyes watched me from hundreds of canvases lining the walls. Every speck of wall or floor was covered in paint or canvas. I set up a camera and focused on the parliament of owls on the wall. I sat down with Nite Owl and asked him about the Bay Area graffiti scene.

“The scene in San Francisco is definitely not what it used to be,” said Nite Owl. “There’s a lot of corporate and city-backed pieces, so you’re not getting a real cross-section of city artists doing them, only the safe artists. It’s a sham.”

Since 2004, when San Francisco passed a graffiti removal ordinance requiring property owners to remove graffiti promptly or pay steep fines, spontaneous street art has been vigorously targeted for removal by the city.

Only planned murals, with content approved by property owners or the San Francisco Arts Commission, are safe from destruction. Non-approved pieces are considered graffiti and vandalism. And for street artists like Nite Owl, controversy is the whole point.

“Anything done illegally is probably better,” said Nite Owl. “Well, I don’t want to say better, but at least it represents the people who live there.”

I was hoping to produce a documentary about the evolution of street art in the Bay Area. I wanted to follow the art as it was slowly chased out of Oakland, just as it had been chased out of San Francisco years earlier. I needed a scene with Nite Owl, so I asked him to let me shoot video as he painted. He invited me to meet him at a small wall in North Oakland.

The wall was in a garbage nook wedged between an apartment building and a commercial space. Nite Owl said he knew the owner, and was commissioned to paint the wall every so often. His work, and that of two other graffiti writers, was already on the wall. That day, he painted over the wall and created a new piece.

I watched his large owl take shape through the camera’s viewfinder. A haze of paint particles filled the air. I was a bit lightheaded by the end. I could see why Nite Owl wore a heavy-duty mask. I was so dizzy that I had to leave just before he finished. I came back the next morning to see the finished piece.

It was early November 2016. A week later, the election changed everything. The media became the Trump show, and no one cared to hear much about the nuances of street art verses vandalism.