A shoe brush, water, old socks, cleaning fluid, and elbow grease are the tools of a British street artist known as Moose, who creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels. Some authorities call it vandalism, but Moose, whose real name is Paul Curtis says that what he is doing is cleaning up the street, and that he is leaving no real marks and is cleaning up the dirt of urban life.
Moose says that he got the idea watching people write their names on dirty tunnel walls using their fingers in his hometown of Leeds, in the U.K. This form of street art is called “reverse graffiti,” and other artists including Brazilian artist Alexandre Orion and street artist Banksy have also used this technique.
Moose usually does work on tunnels, signs, and retaining walls. One of his best known pieces was in the Broadway Tunnel in San Francisco. At the time he was working for a record label, and they wanted to promote a new album. Lacking the funds for advertising, they scrubbed their message into the walls of tunnels around his hometown of Leeds, England.
A few years ago, he worked with a group of Greenpeace eco-warriors. They piled into a zodiac raft, armed with pressure washers, and buzzed across the Thames River to a blackened retaining wall near the House of Parliament. When they’d finished their work, the wall was emblazoned with the message: “DON’T CHANGE THE CLIMATE. CHANGE THE POLITICS.”
“The environmental message [in my art] is unavoidable, “Moose says. “I’m writing in grime….If I can intrigue people to look closer, and then shock them with the contrast between where the wall was cleaned and where it was dirty … It’s just a quirky little way of getting the point out to people.”
Links:
NPR Morning Edition – Moose and his work