I painted along Blvd Saint-Denis in central Paris after the metros stopped running for the night. It’s a busy section of the city and is empty for only a few hours every day; that was my thinking. But once I started walking the Blvd at 1am looking for spots to paint I found the sidewalks scattered with Children of the Night. Drunk Eastern Europeans with tattoed faces watched while I stalked around the façade to a Turkish restaurant looking for a canvas. By the time I found this blue door full of tags with an empty spot in the middle fit for Cally prostitutes were eyeing me as a john and some Somalis across the streets were clucking at me and making hand gestures and asking, “hashish?” My French is shit so instead of responding to anyone I pulled a stencil from my carrier, taped it to the door and started my painting. By the time I finished the first layer and turned around my audience was gone...Children of the Night don’t give a shit about Street Art. Once I finished painting Cally I painted two more times on Blvd Saint-Denis before ending at Gare du Norde to catch the notorious N44 bus back to my neighborhood in Saint-Denis. My friends call it the outlaw bus because of the late hours that it operates and the people who ride it. I sat beside a pair of recently maimed members of ISIS; they kept to themselves; one was missing the lower half of hid leg and the other was missing his right arm from the elbow down and the bandages were a bit bloody. I couldn’t help but sneak peeks at their stumps for the 20 minute journey home.

I painted this cat on the side of Lolita's Market on the East End of Pearl Street. The market is a hub for drifters passing through town and local derelicts who live free and can't hold a job. I have been coming to this Market my whole life. I remember standing waist high to my dad when he bought cigarettes here. The Market respects my art and keeps it on their walls but their patrons go after the art hard and add mustaches or tags or cigarette burns to the composition. After a season or two the painting looks like crap and the tags look like a war in ink so I cover the mess and paint a new painting. Lolita's has turned into my revolving outdoor gallery.

Once Guate Mao and his agent Mehdi finished givng me the whirlwind introduction tour to Paris we got down to the real business of late-night ninja style painting. I had already painted alone in Paris a handful of times but with a team it was different. Guate Mao was brazen with his painting, doing it under bright lights on busy boulevards. A drunk Russian, big muscles and all to fit the American stereotype, started screaming mottled French at us while Guate Mao painted; I had to step in front and jut my jaw while my comrades laughed it off telling me he's just drunk. By the time that I found a good wall to paint on in That Marais my adrenaline was jacked Sky high. I slipped into The Zone while painting this cheetah, time disappeared and all I had on my table was one thing: this painting. I used so many colors that I ended up borrowing a couple colors from Guate Mao and in the end it was one of the best paintings that I've made to date. The next day when I passed through the neighborhood to look at it under the rainlouds I realized it was next to a school and there were dozens of kids in the street around it.

As a teenager my father lived on 17th street, a few blocks north of Pearl Street, so most Friday and Saturday nights my Road Dawg and I would stalk the alleys behind the shops. We knew all the routes to the rooftops and we’d go on top of Falafal King and throw water balloons at drunk college kids when the bars emptied out. A decade later when I imagined myself living in a Shakespeare tragedy I’d stalk these alleys in a huff of revolutionary fervor; I worked downtown and always ended up scheming anti-war themes in these alleys, taking coworkers onto rooftops, teaching the transients about the police routes and schedules in the area, warning pot smokers when they were in the vicinity of a Colorado Security Company patrol and in general doing my best to lend to the chaos of life. And here I am ten years later, living in the here and now with you. I still walk these downtown alleys often. Maybe with a friend or with my lady or holding a new pair of Nike270s that I scored at Buffalo Exchange, but generally in these alleys I’m alone...late at night, with a backpack full of spraypaint and a folder full of stencils.

I’d take a good friend over a tank full of gold bars any day of the week. That’s probably why I’ve got a slew of posse’s but don’t own jack shit. Anyhoo, when I was living in Paris with my stencil bro Guate Mao, helping him prepare for his first solo show, the apartment filled up quickly with friends that never left. Mehdi came down from Lilles and claimed the couch. Yasmine shared the bed with Guate Mao. By the time Mato arrived at our apartment in Saint-Denis my floor was the only spot for him to sleep. He snored and raged in his sleep but it only took a day or two for him to become one of the best friends I’ve ever made. He is a member of the Sea Shepards; revolutions dream in his blood like salt fills the ocean. Women love him and every time we walk home at 3am after painting in the 13th the Arabs that sell hashish follow us and contemplate robbing us because Mato carries himself like a king. He can be drunk with snot in his mustache and paint all over his hands and shoes and pants and he still walks like he owns the world.

Cats. Growing up as an only child, a latchkey kid, the cats were my most consistent friends but they were also my witness. I knew the cat by the bus stop in my neighborhood; I knew the cats that lived around my school, the cats on my cousins street and the cats in the alleys on Pearl Street. I’ve always lived with cats—connecting with them along the road of childhood brought me out of my imagination and into a tactile experience of presence. Cats taught me how to be present in the Here and Now so I guess in Boulder Speak you could say that cats have been my guru. A lot of nights when I’m out painting it is an updated version of my childhood experience as cats visit me at my wall, rub against my ankle while I tape the stencil to the wall and they bear witness.

Living in Colorado is synonymous with knowing the local animals. If you’re rooting for transhumanism to win than the Rocky Mountains are your nightmare. Geese on the sidewalks with their crap on the lawns while more geese honk in flying formation high above. Squirrels that fatten up on the Halloween pumpkin you put on the front stoop on October 30th so by the 31st it looks like some Jaune stencil characters went to town on it with mini-hatchets. Foxes dipping in and out of sight beneath the streetlights with a quickness that puts an Olympian to shame. Mountain lions staked out in afternoon backyards of foothill rental apartments and bears eating fruit in the trees in the alleys on The Hill. Deer munching your lilacs in the springtime and walking brazenly in-pack down Broadway in the Autumn. The midwinter crows are a soundtrack to my midwinter memories but come midsummer it’s the Blue Jays perched in junipers and menacing the alley-cats. But where are the Bobcats? Have you seen one? I’ve seen one in all my life living here in the Rocky Mountains. These big cats are the king of sly.

There was just something that felt right about painting one of my closest homies on a federal postbox. It’s a lil different flavor of a thrill painting on federal property and in ‘18 and ‘19 I spent a lot of time skirting French Law with this guy so maybe that vibrational resonance has something to do with it.

I painted this as part of a series of portraits of Boulderites. Her name is Mighty Tiny and I’ve gotten to know her since making this painting. Even for a solo midnight slinker like me the power and beauty of art brought connection and her multi-faceted approach to her creations has reminded me of my artistic roots. At some point I would like to bring other techniques into my Street Art besides stencil and some free-hand brushstrokes with accompanying splatters.

As a kid it was a dream to play football in the NFL. I figured I’d win the Heisman at CU before ‘going pro’, emulating what Rashaan Salaam did. None of that happened and I’m fine with that because my heart grew away from the game, but I will always admire the young people who fall in love with a sport and have the talent, dedication and passion to follow the road until they’re one of the best on the planet at what they do. This is a stencil of Laviska Shenault, a jack-of-all-trades superstar wide receiver for the CU Buffs and a talent who captivated the city of Boulder for the two years that he played in town.

When I paint in Paris I typically take the metro subway from my home in the commune of Saint-Denis to The Left Bank or Montmartre or Buttes aux Cailles and then make the hours-long walk home long after the metro has stopped running for the night. But I painted this version of my boy Hermes on a parking meter facing my front door and tho I moved back to Boulder and the world moved onwards full of Buffers my friends in Saint-Denis occasionally text me a pic of this painting and say that it brings me to mind.

Malatesta was a social organizer from Italy whose ideas on Workers Rights spread from the 1880s onwards and became part of the ideological foundation of the Unions that became so prominent in the Western World throughout the Twentieth Century. I could keep upchucking some Wiki at you but I’ma comment on how this man stuck to his principles. In a time when the gap between the rich and poor was, well, similar to how it is today the terroristic arm of the cutting-edge ideology of Anarchy appealed to the intellectual rebels of the era—mostly the men with little dicks who wanted to incite desperate young men to bomb civilians in the name of equality and justice for all. In this social climate Malatesta rejected reactionary violence and helped engineer the structures that would underpin the modern version of the Union. Slapping someone might stop the problem for a moment but if you bargain with them instead than the problem may stop forever.

When I first met the Parisian Midnight Stencil Ninja named Guate Mao we spent a month going wild painting on walls in Paris and then dipped down to the south of France to spend a month at his families home in Le Teil and prepare for his upcoming show. His pops, an ex super-model who looks like Brando and wears mini-skirts, owns a hippie-era van with a horn that sounds like a police siren and I drove this all over the South while making paintings at night. This area is Cezanne’s hallowed turf and the night breeze smells like a midnight summer breeze in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado.

If you see this cat it’s trouble, but it’s the best kind of the trouble. The kind of trouble that I go looking for any day of the week. But this only applies if trouble is just another name for friendship because the two always seem to end up being one in the end, just like everything else does.

Once upon a time when I was a lil younger and just returned from hiking around Yemen I was depleted and defeated by The American Way of Life. I had no kefi for life and was sad and bored and living at my mothers house without much interest in finding my own crib or a job. It was the tail end of winter and I’d find myself headed to the edge of my city and I’d hike out into the prairie until I could no longer hear or see civilization. I’d lay on my back and watch the Turkey Vultures circle high in the great blue sky above…it felt like I was a boxer on my back in the ring, out for the count but then something happened: I began to feel excitement and I began to dream big dreams in the forum of my imagination while my mind was quiet and took good notes of the imaginings. Every day for two weeks I walked into the prairie, even during a snowstorm, and laid in nature for hours on end and let the breeze and sounds and hues wash over me and play my mind like a virtuoso violinist and as Jah would have it the dream of SMiLE was born. My kefi returned! The Muse was always waiting to dance but I was ready to rock n roll again. Good old nature. I haven’t been back out there since.

This stencil is based on an oil painting that I made on the night that I called my college football coaches and told them that I wasn’t going to be their starting left cornerback anymore. They cussed me out and said that I still had a chance to make the NFL but I laughed and moved on. At sunset I set-up an easel in the field at the base of the flatirons and tho I had never used oil colors before I had a lifetime of making art under my belt and oil paints was just another rotation of what I already knew. I painted under the stars with a headlamp on to see my canvas and by sunrise the painting was finished and I felt like a new Being…the athlete will always remain but the jock was gone and in its place was an artist with an itch to see the world and repeatedly risk death to experience the numinous and the exotic and the undefined. After crazy falls from Fairy Chimneys in Cappadocia to debilitating viruses in Yemen to dodging human traffickers in Albania I’ve loved some of the riskiest propositions that this planet has to offer and I’m happy to be a Midnight Ninja now and not a pile of undiscovered bones in a field outside of Kayseri.

Placement is important. When I first started painting on the streets I painted in places that meant something to me or places that I would’ve loved to see some illegal art when I was a kid. But as time went on and I nailed most of my ‘special spots’ I primarily took into account the ambiance of a spot. The texture of the surface I’d be painting on. The lighting on it at different times of day. The sights and sounds that people would experience when they stopped to enjoy it. In a place like Paris it is easy to find the perfect spot to paint but in a city that is barely one-hundred years old like Boulder it takes a bit more listening to the intuition to commit to a painting spot. This owl is perhaps my favorite location specific painting in Boulder, it just fits perfect with the dark hidey-hole and the menace of the owls expression lends a feeling of malice emergent. I also used to stash stuff in this spot as a kid. My pops lived a block from where I painted and when I painted this owl it felt like half of my mind was traipsing through old memories while I worked.

Kick back and relax and take a nap somewhere outside of your natual habitat.

The bond between sons and mothers is a lot like the bond between daughters and fathers.

Tags get hounded and handed a bad rap. The denizens of the metropolis tend to find them ugly vandalism; true artists tend to find tags to be crass bullshit made by Sunday Night Painters; even other taggers tend to consider tags their competition, they cap ‘em and band ‘em and leave ‘em bleeding beneath a cross-out. But I’m out of the loops, a free radical and tags have always been beauty for my eyes to behold. I like to paint beside tags and if it’s a creative tag it’s fun to try and work it into my composition.

The wildfires over Boulder painted the sky sepia for most of the summer of 2020.

The sunset on the Boulder Flatirons, a beautiful sight that I rarely see unless I’ve been awake all night long.

Avoiding the authorities is just a natural part of the Street Art biz. Muralists get permits and play capitalism and that’s cool too but it doesn’t carry the same resonance as authentic Street Art. And a big part of that resonance is the lingering vibe of thrill and daredevilry that passerby’s pick up as they notice the art. It’s a glimpse of freedom shared from soul to soul. I painted this portrait of Jack Kerouac in Bologna, Italy while being besieged by the local Graffiti Police. It was after midnight and I was two-layers into the three-layer portrait when all hell broke loose. I had an ace up my sleeve but we’ll get to that. So as I’m finishing the second layer, swish-swishing the last few sprays before I switch out the layer for the final one but before I get to that I spot a tiny police cruiser pull up to the stop-sign across the street from me. I’m painting on an electrical box on the biggest street in the city so there’s a lot of space between the cop and where I’m hidden in shadows beneath one of the famed Bolognese porticos. I’m hoping he hasn’t seen me, but when he zips forward and drives in the wrong lane towards me I know I’ve been spotted. These graf cops are trained with hawk-vision to spot art perps like me, I tell myself that this is next-level shi. I don’t even speak Italian, what do I do if this cop snags me? So I tear the stencil off of the electrical box and sprint along the portico and away from the cop. I hear his engine rev and it sounds like an electic car in hot pursuit. I turn left into a narrow one-way street, toss my can of spraypaint behind a dumpster, grab the stencil in my mouth and scale a ten-foot tall wall. As I dive over the wall I see the cops headlights start entering the alley. Did he see me? I hear him zoom passed and then slow up about forty-yards away, probably wondering how I disappeared. I’m standing in someone’s yard with what appears to be a small urban pear orchard. As soon as I hear the cop speed up I’m outta the yard, first atop the fence watching the cop take a left and lost from sight and then my feet are back on the pavement and I’m sprinting back towards where I came from. I make it to the Kerouac painting and in the distance on the main drag I see a second cop car speeding my way with the sirens flashing but quiet. None of the cops can see me here in the shadows yet. Now it’s time for that ace up my sleeve. I turn towards the heavy ash door across from the Kerouac painting and I dial in the four-digit code to unlock the door. I slide in and quickly shut the door and stare at the open-air courtyard in front of me with its peaceful gurgling fountain. I listen for awhile as the cops enter the portico and rat-a-tat their Italian and then I go to my AirBandB room and get the spraycans ready for the third-layer of the painting while I give the police time to disperse and move on.