What would happen if the Greyman had nothing to paint over? Not that there wouldn’t be graffiti, but that it was done without paint? Missoula being the environmentally friendly “green” town that it is should have no problems with this, right?

Let’s first have a look at the existing “green” art we already have here in Missoula, namely, SponCon. Spontaneous Construction is one hell of a lot of fun, and, when it’s all over, there’s some great art that gets produced out of recycled materials found out in the Home Resource yard. Often, as was the case this year with the solar shower, the art is quite functional.

I can’t think of any other environmentally friendly art that gets produced in this town, especially not on such a large scale in plain view for public consumption.

The fact that the building of the art at SponCon occurred in the street does not make it street art, of course. That would be a stretch. But it started me thinking about alternative ways to make street art.

Then I remembered a FWDed email my ‘ole man sent me about Scott Wade, who, using a special Jedi mind-trick lightsaber brush, works in caliche covered cars to “unpaint” them into art.

How fun would it be to do something like this on some dirty Suby that’s just come back from the woods? Or the back of a dirty UPS truck this winter? Next summer, should we have an awful fire season, I’d like to see folks come out en mass and do reverse graff on car windows around town.

Scott Wade does Johannes Vermeer

I was hoping to dig through my old email to find the photos, when a good friend of mine sent me over to Environmental Graffiti, where they spotlighted the 35 Greatest Works of Environmental Graffiti.

The dust paintings I’d seen before, and many of the stuff done by “the public” I had also seen before.  Yes, it’s impressive, but I really liked the reverse graffiti done by a guy who goes by Moose.  Oh, Man, I thought, when I saw Moose, how great would it be if some architecture firm in town or maybe a sustainable building supply company contracted with a local artist in town to do a reverse graffiti ad somewhere.
I was disapointed but not surprised to see that the Grey Cancer made it to the SF Broadway Tunnel, defacing Moose’s work.  I’m not so upset that the cancer is on the wall, but that some asshole who thinks he’s a graff artist (You know who you are, troll) would tag such beauty.  Anyway,  Check out what Moose did on San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel to advertise Green Works:

Moose gets green on San Francisco

Then I started thinking, Where in Missoula would we find a building dirty enough to do something of that scale? I can’t think of any building, but the Orange Street underpass might be a good place. Or not.

But it is well suited for something along the lines of the work that Alexandre Orion does. A transport tunnel in Sao Paolo, Brazil isn’t that far of a stretch from Missoula. OK, well, maybe it is, but I would love to see the faces on some of those SUV driving soccer moms if they were greeted by an Orange Street underpass that had piles and piles of skulls the entire length of the tunnel. Do you think they’d think at all about the detrimental impact their emissions have on the planet, on our economy, on the lives of our men and women dying in the desert?

Alexandre Orion - Skulls in Brazilian Tunnel

What type of reverse graffiti would you like to see in Missoula?  And how would the Greyman handle it?  Would he clean the rest of the building?  Would the artist still be arrested for defacing property, even though he was cleaning it?  Would the punishment be that the artist would have to clean the rest of the building?

If you want to do a little reverse graff and need inspiration, check out the captures from everyday Joes that EnviroGraff has.