Paint | Brian Kosoff

Paint

Parking lots exhibiting Rothko and Diebenkorn paintings in Portland Oregon? That’s what I have encountered during the Covid Pandemic of 2020.

Like everyone else I had to change my usual routines in 2020. After the closure of gyms and other forms of exercise my wife and I started taking long walks through various neighborhoods of Portland Oregon.  It was on these walks that I first noticed this interesting phenomenon.

Like many urban areas Portland has a fair amount of graffiti. There are truly beautiful murals and graphics, which by their lack of any marring or damage seem respected by the public and even by those who owned the walls on which this art appeared. Over a long span of time no one graffitied on these pieces and no property owner painted them over. They were art for the public and were appreciated.

There is another form of graffiti less appreciated by the public and especially by those who owned the walls on which they appeared. These were people simply “tagging” a wall with their name and maybe a statement, political or obscene, sometimes both.  It is this graffiti that led directly to the accidental creation of abstract expressionist paintings.

When property owners felt compelled to paint over graffiti they found offensive or unattractive they would use whatever paint they had on hand, or whatever paint they could get cheap. It appears there was little thought about color and the eventual appearance. A battle of wills between the graffitist and the property owner played out as layer upon layer of crude rectangles would be laid over each new layer of graffiti. This resulted in colorful rectangles on top of or adjacent to other colorful rectangles. I could not help but notice how this unintended collaboration could yield what was ultimately art.

On every walk I brought a camera but often would return a few days later, better equipped in order to photograph this art more deliberately, and when the light would be better or the parking lot would be empty.  I’ve gotten to a point where I know virtually all the graffiti in every parking lot in Portland west of the Willamette River.  When my wife and I drove through town I’d pass a parking lot and say, “I got that one”.  I’d say that often.

Sometimes I’d see that new graffiti appeared on a wall that I had photographed weeks or months earlier. I’d smile to myself because I knew that in a few months there’d  be a new abstraction to photograph.