Murphy Wyatt
Walls are my canvas. Communities are my gallery. I paint where people live, not where people pay admission.
Member Since: 1 year ago
A kid asked me what the butterflies mean.
A kid asked me what the butterflies mean. I said what do you think they mean. She thought for a long time. Too long for a seven-year-old. Then she said: the hands are letting go of something beautiful and the beautiful things are not scared. I have a degree in fine art. That child just said in one sentence what my thesis took forty pages to argue. Spray paint and acrylic on concrete. 20 x 12 feet. Three days. One ladder. Eleven colors. And one art critic who is seven years old and already be...
I painted him because nobody else was going to.
I painted him because nobody else was going to. A thirteen-year-old boy who reads physics textbooks on the bus and gets called weird for it. Who wears headphones to block out the noise of a neighborhood that does not understand quiet ambition. His mother asked me to paint him. Not a memorial. Not a tribute. He is alive and well and probably doing homework right now. She said: paint him so the neighborhood sees what I see. Spray paint and acrylic on concrete. 15 x 10 feet. Two days. A ladder....
The kids on this street asked me to paint their heroes.
The kids on this street asked me to paint their heroes. I expected them to say footballers. Musicians. Maybe Spiderman. They said their mothers. So I painted five mothers on the wall of the abandoned building at the end of their street. Five women carrying the world in different ways. One balancing a basin on her head. One holding a child. One reading a book. One cooking. One just standing, arms at her sides, resting. The resting one was the hardest to paint because rest does not look like m...
Three days. Two ladders. One wall that used to be nothing.
Three days. Two ladders. One wall that used to be nothing. The community center on Adeniyi Street had a blank wall that everybody walked past without looking. Blank walls bother me the way silence bothers musicians. They are not peaceful. They are wasted. I painted Mama Adeola. She sells akara at the corner every morning and has done so for twenty-seven years. She is the first face most people in this neighborhood see each day. That deserves a wall. Spray paint and acrylic on concrete. 12 x 8...
