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Feb. 5--While city officials are urging businesses and citizens to take up arms against graffiti, there is another growing segment of the population that sees some forms of graffiti as art.
This is not tagging or scrawling random messages on buildings without invitation.
Instead, graffiti as an art form takes careful planning and the artists who specialize in the genre are in growing demand as businesses search for new ways to advertise and shape their images.
Shaun Martinez, 18, is a South High School senior who took advantage of the trend.
Martinez spent three days working on a mural for Scott Darnell, a photographer who has a studio in Avondale.
"I got the idea from watching rail cars go by," Darnell said. "Every day when I was waiting to pick my daughter up I would sit and watch the cars go by and occasionally one would go by that was really artistic."
Darnell said he wanted a backdrop with an urban feel on his property 12 miles east of Pueblo. So he put out word that he was looking for a graffiti artist to do work on a shed and eventually hired Martinez.
"He gave me $400 worth of senior pictures in exchange, so it really worked out good for me," Martinez said.
Martinez said he was surprised a photographer would want to use graffiti as a backdrop, but added that the art form is growing in acceptance.
"There's a lot more of it out there now," he said. "A lot more people are using it as displays for their business's names or for buildings."
Martinez said friends have asked him to paint their bedrooms and design T-shirts for them. He said he wants to pursue graphic design in college to use graffiti style artwork in other avenues.
Martinez said he's frustrated when the issue of graffiti in a community gets painted with a broad political brush.
"You can tell the difference between somebody just going down Northern (Avenue) writing the same thing on every third wall, than an entire building that's covered in art," he said. "I think they make the art side of it look bad."
Martinez said he does his work on paper, a computer and with the permission of property owners. It's a lot easier that way and it gives him more time to work on a project, he said.
It also begins to legitimize an art form that's born of, and maintains strong ties to, the modern counterculture and hip-hop movements.
"I look at it as an art form," Martinez said. "There are kids and people who can do it as a legitimate art form and there are others who do it just to deface property. They are two different things. One thing you don't see in Pueblo that you do in other cities are the whole sides of buildings as an art form. It's not like what you see in the paper."
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