Kelly Goff
He seemingly came out of nowhere around the corner, carrying his skateboard up the steep hill. He disappeared over the white picket fence of an empty lot between two million-dollar homes only a few hundred feet farther, swallowed by the night and the weeds.
“Yohz” stood at the back of the abandoned lot, looking down what would have been the back entrance to the never-realized house. Elaborate balustrades criss-crossed down the hill, a maze of faux-Italian columns and imitation marble, rising up expansively into nothing.
He quickly took off down a flight of stairs, underneath the first level of what perhaps would have been some sort of patio or hanging garden.
Unpacking his cans by the light of his cell phone and a faltering street light that hummed down below between bursts of hazy mercury light and darkness, he walked to the wall and touched his canvas in the moonlight, feeling it out before beginning his work.
“Yohz,” a tagging moniker, grew up mostly in Arleta, living for nearly 12 years with the same foster mother after being taken from his own parents.
He says that he was quiet in school. “I would just kind of slide by, but then my doodles caught attention.”
His doodles were the beginning of what would become an obsession with graffiti art and culture.
While the underground culture of graffiti is primarily associated in the media, especially in Los Angeles, with gang wars over turf, Yohz sees a different aspect.
Not affiliated with a gang, but sometimes painting with other members of his tagging crew, a loose-knit group of fellow artists, he says “it’s about a desire to see things colorful, with a vibrant youth spirit, not just gray.”
“I like vibrance, a rich spirit, that’s what I want to be seen.”
He bristles at comparisons to gang taggers who simply “bomb” or do “throw-ups” – quick, unplanned tags of an artist’s or gang’s name – but expresses respect for some gang art that utilizes otherwise long-dead calligraphy.
“When you look at it, there’s energy. It’s bold, it’s intimidating.
“That’s what the original creators in the 1200s were trying to establish – something bold… the word of Christ, the Crusades.”
At 16, Yohz found himself homeless after being kicked out of his foster home. He spent time bumming couches at friend’s places and sleeping where he could.
He managed to graduate high school and spent a lot of time reading, educating himself on art and philosophy.
He cites Dr. Martin Luther King while backing up his arguments about the difference between artistic graffiti and the gang graffiti that has been the subject of numerous city task forces and Los Angeles Police Department initiatives.
Despite many taggers’ insistence that their art is different from the gang tags targeted by the police, last year there were 675,454 incidents reported to the city’s 311 system for graffiti removal.
Of his art, Yohz says, “It captured me. It’s a search for knowledge in all forms. I can get really focused.”
While he still spends some nights beautifying washes, abandoned billboards and long-empty lots, he now aspires to art school.
He is taking art classes at Pierce College, helped along by the stability of a foster home that became permanent this year when his most recent foster mother adopted him at the age of 20.
Still, his love for the thrill of a canvas not made for the studio is intrinsic to his being. When he talks about how to get to a spot without being conspicuous, his green eyes light up, he touches his ruddy red hair and he starts speaking more quickly, and fluidly, than the reserved, quiet demeanor with which he introduces himself.
“There’s an adrenaline rush. You’re risking your life to do this sort of thing… you lose yourself trying to produce something.
“It’s because you really want to express yourself, to communicate.”
While he knows that his rap sheet – which includes vandalism, cocaine sales and methamphetamine possession – may keep him from his goal of attending Otis School of Art and Design, to him it seems worth it.
“I’ll just keep painting.”
Yohz sits at home, surrounded by products for his artwork. Currently taking classes at Pierce, he hopes to one day be able to transfer to an art school, but finds his graffiti exhilarating. ()
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