Graffiti artist lets work speak for itself
Allan Boyco*
What Larry MacDonald has to say is writ large on a parking lot wall off Broad Street in downtown Victoria. He’s about three-quarters of the way through a giant ‘graffiti project’ there, an urban streetscape, recognizable as Victoria’s Wharf Street, but transformed into a brilliant gaussian blur of motion, colour, and shapes—a dreamscape sprayed and brushed onto MacDonald’s brick-and-mortar canvas.
“This transcends what you would normally label graffiti,” says Inner Worlds gallery owner Brenda Tanner, whose shop is on the other side of MacDonald’s mural. “It’s new-age art. There’s nothing cartoonish about his figures. They’re real, or I should say surreal in a representational style. They evoke the figures he’s creating rather than insisting on definitive shapes and form.”
MacDonald didn’t ask permission, ‘he took it,’ Tanner said. She arrived at her gallery one morning about a month ago, and the painting was emerging from the street-side corner of the wall. At the back of the lot, occupying one of the gallery’s parking spots, MacDonald had pitched his tent.
“My first instinct was to call the police and have him removed,” she said. “But even then, with just a patch of paint on the wall, I could see something very special about his work. So I held off. I am an artist, after all. So how could I simply have him kicked off my lot just because he was creating in an unconventional manner.”
She uses words like ‘unconventional’ and ‘unique’ to describe not only MacDonald’s art, but also his personality. Most people would judge him as ‘weird’ or ‘on the spectrum,’ although which spectrum would be hard to identify.
“He’s acutely shy,” Tanner explained. At first, he wouldn’t talk to her. “I had to build trust, as if I was trying to coax a raccoon or some other feral species to take food out of my hand,” she recalled. “Now he will talk to me—if he’s in the right frame of mind.”
Although he’s an urban creature, MacDonald lives ‘off the grid’ in every sense of the word. He places a tin pot at the entrance to the Inner World Gallery’s lot, with a sign saying, ‘Give & Take.’ Passers-by, impressed by his art, will drop coins and bills into it; street people dip into the stash. If there’s nothing left at closing time Tanner will ‘drop a twenty inside his tent,’ on her way out ‘just so he can get a bite to eat.’
“He doesn’t thank me,” she explained. “But I can feel his gratitude. If he said it out loud, it would place an obligation on me. He doesn’t want to do that.”
Tanner acted as my intermediary when I interviewed MacDonald; he wouldn’t even give me a glance when I tried talking to him directly.
He’s been living on the streets for about five years, but wouldn’t say how he ended up homeless or where he came from. “Doesn’t matter,” he told Tanner.
How did he learn to paint? “I’ve been sketching and painting since I was a kid. Never took any lessons—didn’t have money for that—but I looked at all kinds of art in books and galleries and tried out lots of styles.”
How does MacDonald choose his subject matter, and what does his art mean to him? He shrugged. “I just see things as if I was dreaming with my eyes opened, and I paint them—not exactly how I see them, but what I see in them, and what they see in me.”
What does he expect others to see, looking at his art? “That’s up to them. They won’t see what I do; they’ll see things from their own points of view. Are they afraid of what they see, angered by it, bored—the art lives in the eyes of the beholders and becomes what they make of it.”
So go take a look at MacDonald’s wall art, and see what you see—perhaps gain a new perspective on your self.
Please note: This ‘article’ describes events and characters that did not happen and do not exist. It is part of a work of fiction under the working title Entrapment.