Included in this exploration of why we make marks on things, is photographic documentation of a site not considered polite but rather shocking and deservedly heartrending.  Because my art is not yet flying off the shelves I  exchange my days in the service trades as a painter of not only fine art but houses as well.  In the course of my career I’ve encountered many messes requiring that fresh coat of color to sell the place or rent the space, but usually to hide the sins of neglect and camouflage damage of many types.  None were as poignant as this.

            In response to her father’s suicide a young girl expresses her feelings on the garage wall next to where he hung himself in heroin addicted despair. Check the small print. With emotions spray painted in unanswerable pain, she black markers haunting questions only Tony Cool can respond to.  Before repainting this wall in preparation for the new tenants I shot these frames  at different times while burning incense and cleaning up rat excrement.

            No disrespect intended to the parties involved.  I offer this photo mural as a testimonial to man’s inhumanity to woman through the eyes of an abandoned daughter, now a fatherless child.

Expecting life to be fair is naïve as balance is achieved on scales beyond our mundane comprehensions of fate and vengeance, revenge and destiny.  How would I have reacted if it had been my father?  Or she was my sister or he was my brother?  How would my life be different now?  What if I was Tony Cool? 

Questions rose during the 3 weeks it took to rip out the carpets, clean and repaint the interior.  I thankfully can surmise answers without first-hand knowledge.  I’m confident you would rather your 8 year old child found a copy of Playboy instead of his/her father’s body hanging in the carport from a rope.  The emotional impacts of her simple questions become billboards of pain on the canyon walls of the soul, the small print of suffering. Paint creates an environmental erasure of the previous inhabitants like a new skin reincarnates an old drum.  After I was finished the past was history. Covered over like forgotten stains of previous water damage.

What drives us to use physical expression to voice our thoughts and emotions? Is communication a cathartic release from individual suffering as well as transcendental joy? Is the human condition best summed up by Blues singers?

An internet story released on the Discovery Channel April 17, 2003 reported the finding of a note or 'message of despair', written and hidden in 1944.  Workers renovating the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp found the note.

"I want to go home," read the note, written 4.19.1944 and stuffed into a bottle by a German Communist identified only as Anton E. "When will I see my loved ones in Cologne? But my spirit is not broken. Everything will be better soon."

"It cant be a call for help because the letter was hidden inside the wall," said the memorial site's spokesman, Horst Seferens, it must be "a message for the future, so as not to die without leaving any trace."

Compare the following photographs.

Children's Chalk Art and Rock Art site at Anaeho'omalu.

Post-contact petroglyph at Pu'uloa and graffiti on water tank.

California belief-system signage and prehistoric belief-system focus from Pohue.

Differences and similarities between medium and message.

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