By Brian Myers
April showers couldn’t keep artist Laurie Carlock inside while one of her community murals stayed vandalized.
Earlier this week Carlock pulled painting supplies out of her car’s trunk, wiped the raindrops off the gunite wall on the northeast corner of Fairmount and Home avenues and started covering the vandal tags with her own paint.
It’s a process Carlock, a seasoned community muralist, knows well. She has many murals in City Heights: the driveway in Hollywood Park, walls near the entrance to Swan Canyon and multiple utility boxes surrounding the City Heights Urban Village.
And she has declared war with those who attempt to destroy her efforts and vandalize her neighborhood.
“It pisses me off every I see it,” Carlock said.
It’s an ongoing struggle for Carlock, who says once the tagging starts it attracts gang members and teenagers to add more tagging.
“I don’t like it in my neighborhood, I don’t like it for my neighbors, I don’t like it for myself, don’t like it for young children – we’re on war with it,” she said.
Carlock’s battles with vandals often occur at community cleanups and revitalization efforts, or on her own time when she has matching paint colors.
But Carlock is careful to make a distinction between graffiti and tagging.
“Graffiti is beautiful,” Carlock said.
But it’s the tagging – the quick scribbles on walls and objects – that Carlock said is hurting the aesthetic of her neighborhood.
When she noticed the Peace Wall vandalized with a prominent red tag and quickly went to work removing it.
“The faster you get it off, the less you have,” Carlock said.
In its nearly 30 years the Peace Wall has become an icon of City Heights. It was created by a graffiti artist commissioned by community leaders to cover the wall that stabilizes erosion of the slope from crashing down to the sidewalk.
Time had its affect on the mural and it has been repainted at least four times. In the early 2000’s, Carlock was brought on to revive the mural. She kept the peace theme but gave it a new look and expanded the art all the way around the wall.
“Instead of it just being some ugly wall, it’s something more greeting to the people going by,” Carlock said. “I think it really makes a difference, it’s very uplifting to have things like that.”