Why We Paint | Teen Ink

Why We Paint

May 31, 2009
By Sam DeCross BRONZE, Joseph City, Arizona
Sam DeCross BRONZE, Joseph City, Arizona
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Why do we paint? Why do we choose graffiti? Because it's a blissful release. It takes your problems, your stress, your negativity, and breaks it into miniscule particles. When you grab that can, wrap your fingers around it and shake to mix, you fill that aerosol vessel with your energy. Good, bad, whatever you have bottled up inside. Then you look up at that wall, that plywood sheet, that blank canvas. When your finger presses down on that tip, you pull the trigger. All your miniscule particles are released and form a solid, gloss trail. The energy guides itself. It knows where it's going. It knows what path its taking. If it turns, it swoops into just the right curve to put itself back on the right path. The lines, angles, curves. They map out your soul. When you step back from that piece, you can see where you were, where you went, where you have been. Where you are going. With one hand, one finger, you put up a mirror that reflects what's inn your heart. The things you go through every day dwell on you in different ways. You get the scraps that just sit in your head. That stuff just sits on your mind, keeps you from sleeping, keeps you from loving. Keeps you from living. Keeps you from being human. Then there’s the real stuff. The underlying meanings, the lessons in life. The things that make you grow as a person. The stuff that goes to your heart. When you let the paint out, you let the head stuff and the heart stuff out to. The mind stuff is the vapors. It's toxic. It's released into the air, dissolves, burns holes in the O-Zone Layer. You don’t breathe that. The heart stuff hits your canvas, and sticks there. It forms your work, your art. You let all this out, and when you're done, you look at it. When you see it, you process it through your mind. But when you read it like its meant to be read, as a soul-map, it goes back to your heart and you keep your life, lessons, and experiences. But at the same time, you've tossed out all the negativity that plagues your mind. You're bringing yourself back to innocence, keeping yourself gold. It's finger paint.


We put these up in public because we are human beings. We are all unique, we all experience different things. We take it upon ourselves to share our lives with each other in order to come closer and live in a more harmonious world. This can only be done with a mutual understanding between all of us. If we don’t understand each other, we have nothing to unite us. We will continue to be unfamiliar and strange to even our closest neighbors. It all comes down to acceptance. So we paint our souls right outside each others doors.

I paint my soul-map in plain sight, so you may better understand me. My friends, my brothers, paint their soul-maps so you may better understand all of us. We know each other, we don’t hide. We put life on walls in multi-colors so you can see what’s real.

Coat of paint over coat of paint, and it starts getting heavy. Soon, so many people will have thrown their souls up on walls that they will collapse under the weight. Tell me; when this happens, then what will there be between you and me?


The author's comments:
I wrote this after thinking about how as teenagers, we always seem to give ourselves a bad name. Then I began to try to figure out if there was a reason we decide to continue to do so. This was the answer I liked best to my own question.

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