Blog Your Blessings: Sharpies

I have a longstanding love for graffiti in all its permutations--tag, piece, production, carving on a tree, you name it. Writers who have practiced their tags until they can spray or draw the lines with complexity, confidence, and clarity thrill my heart. They are reminding us that letters are beautiful. Letters become words that can become messages that can become poems and prayers and very beautiful things.

Graffiti writers like to play with the shape of letters, the intersection of each character with the other, and the space on which they're drawn. They also become embarrassed and annoyed if you wax too lyrical about an art they think of as their own form of rebellion and vandalism. You're allowed to look, but that doesn't mean you're allowed in. There's an acceptable level of vulnerability even here. That's the human drama for you.

I drag my daughter along to check out the graffiti around these parts. Sometimes she takes pictures, other times she wishes she remembered her camera so she could take pictures.

The walls of New Haven, Connecticut, excited her imagination so much this summer that she broke out the Sharpies and a black book and worked on her tag, Jelly. These were drawn letters--this was illustration, not mere penmanship. She chose the tag because she said she likes the loops in all the letters. That didn't stop her from working on a printed version with straight lines and angles, though, but that's art for you.

She showed her grandparents her tag. My dad said, "Well, if you're Jelly, I'm Jam." So she sat down with her Sharpie pens and Jam was born in the two-dimensional world of the black book. Grandma, we had decided, must be Seeds because the difference between Jelly and Jam is the seeds. Seeds was born in that moment.

Because Grandma and Grandpa encouraged her to draw the letters, she drew them big and bright and outlined in silver and every way she could think of. The colors were brilliant. If she had been weaving baskets or rolling bandages, my parents would have encouraged her, and we'd be supplied with those. As it was, she was writing graffiti. She was using the tools of the trade. With her Sharpies, she made a gift from her heart to her grandparents'. That's love for you. And that's graffiti.

Sharpies draw the line that connects you and me and the next guy. It's a very thin line. Amazing things unfold when we accept each other for who we are and where we are.