29 January 2008

lame tagging

Youngstown Art reflects on his recent trip to The Park:
"[today] I found Mill Creek Park to be astonishingly gorgeous. She was like a beautiful bride in a shimmering pearlescent white gown.

As I made my way through the Bears Den area I was greatly dismayed to find a large amount of graffiti spray painted on the rock faces and tree trunks. I counted over a dozen large designs scrawled throughout the immediate area. There are more I am sure, but I was getting too ticked off and upset to keep counting. Having gone through this area in the late fall , I saw some graffiti but not to the extent of what I saw today. I assume it was done since then, perhaps during the brief warm spell we had early in January.

After carefully examining this graffiti, I came to the conclusion that it was NOT gang related. As far as I could tell, it was not even classic "tagging". Instead there are pot leaves and names. All in all very mundane and cliched.

I also could see where park caretakers had attempted to remove some of the graffiti by what appeared to be sandblasting. This method not only removed the paint but also the natural, dark patina of the rock, as well as the moss and lichens, leaving large, scoured areas of tan sandstone. In one of these scoured areas some half baked "arteest" had spray painted fresh graffiti."

"The park is known as the Green Cathedral for a reason: it connects all of us with the Divine and the Mystical."

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