UPDATE: June 13 2005
As of right now, this page will no longer receive updates. The person whom I made this site for has decided he would rather be an immature, vindictive asshole then preserve what was once a healthy friendship...
NOT!
Vivid's my number one wigga and will be until he does something truly dumb. Then he'll be number two. The truth is, he and I both agree that this site has served its original intention: to expose his name and artwork to the Ottawa graffiti scene.
Vivid is now a well established and respected wall painter. He's already painted with some of the best in the city and has developed a style that is distinctly his own. For that matter, I will no longer be adding new text and images to this page. From now on, this page will serve as a reference to Vivid's body of work between 2001 and the summer of 2005. I've added thirteen new images that will conclude the gallery.
This page will remain up until whenever I decide to stop renewing my domain name. The vaguely gay essay I wrote a year ago will still be up as well.
For the latest Vivid pieces, check the Ottawa thread of the lounge37.com board.
I wish 'Vivs' all the best and may he not die from inhaling too much paint. A shout out to 'Secret' as well.
Derek
UPDATE: May 24 2005
Vivid sent me an e-mail the other day complaining about the lack of updates to 'his' site. Even though I live four hours away, I thought it was necessary to go over to his place and kick him in the face with my new desert boots. Now he knows who is master. Right Vivs?
[photo removed]
(You can't see it in the picture, but he's wearing a pair of those tight
latex pants that reveals his bare ass.)
I grew up in Barrhaven - a small township about twenty minutes outside of Ottawa. As a child Barrhaven was a great place to grow up. There were so many parks and forests to explore, you favored the outdoors over Nintendo. A few years later, those of us too old for hide and seek, yet too young to drive found the dense forests as the perfect refuge to drink and smoke. In no time it became apparent that the one thing Barrhaven had more than greenery was idleness. By the mid 90s, it was routine that every Friday and Saturday night you get drunk and stoned with all your friends in a big giant park. It was also the perfect place to be if you wanted to fight someone or just finger bang your girlfriend in peace. Yet, after one too many noise complaints, the town found it necessary to widen all park paths large enough for a police cruiser to enter and flush out the area. Once the parks became off limits, we had nowhere else to go besides trespass in school yards, loiter in front of convenience stores, or feel paranoid in each other's basements. The town made a few bold attempts to establish youth centers in various areas, yet those lasted only a few months. It was decided that weed and alcohol were better at occupying our time.
Today, Barrhaven's concrete to greenery ratio is about 4:1. The town went under a massive urban development project that literally erected thousands of new houses along its outskirts; while old parks and forests were paved over in favor of restaurants, strip malls, and parking lots. Now there are even more kids, working aimless day jobs, bored out of their fucking minds, looking desperately for merit in a town devoted to being clean and decent. Luckily for them, drugs are even more attainable than ever now.
As an under sexed, pimply faced kid, making art was my only means of repelling the boredom in Barrhaven's isolated location. Most of my work was done on canvas or faggy little cards for girls I liked. One of my friends was getting heavily involved in graffiti and had already acquired a large collection of spray paint cans and fat-tipped markers. One day he invited me to do a wall with him in some girl's basement. This was in the summer of 2001. I remember doing this ugly piece of shit with brushes and a spray can (even though graffiti had an influence in my work I was never any good at it) while my friend worked on this sneering grey and silver goblin face. After I moved to Toronto, I went back home once or twice a year. While Barrhaven's concrete sludge continued to spread like cancer, my friend's passion for graffiti art grew and his work had improved exponentially. I'm not sure when he acquired the alias "Vivid" (I forgot to ask him), but now his work can be seen all over Barrhaven, Ottawa, and the nearby Hull and Gatineau regions of Quebec. During my last stay at home, "Vivid" passed me some encouraging advice. He said, "If you can create art, then do it, because there are very few people out there who can." As someone who is on the verge of disowning art forever, those words punched a hole through the arrogant, pretentious ego I had developed while living in Toronto. It made me remember why I used to spend everyday after school in the art room trying to mix the right colour, or why even now I stay up till four in the morning working on graphics that have to look perfect in any screen resolution. I still hate art (especially anything produced at York University), but that's beside the point.
Though Vivid's work isn't exactly a beacon of originality [update July 2005: that can be disputed now] , his dedication to the art form is as real as it gets. Besides the fact that he started late in the game, he's got plenty of time to develop. His work also communicates a strange familiarity with me. His art is the result of living in a town where the only means of escape is with a car or a joint. He covers Barrhaven in bright colours because the landscape is a myriad of dullness. When I read Vivid's cryptic poems, things such as "This life I live and die," or "A wish for things that work," I see an address to the meaninglessness that growing up in Barrhaven has become. Vivid is pretty much summing up what every kid in Barrhaven feels.
I made him this site because he is too dumb to buy a digital camera [update April 2005: he has one now]. In case you are blind, samples of his work are to the right of this heart-wrenching speech.
Vivid's e-mail address is crawf420@hotmail.com. Please ask him permission if you intend to reproduce any of the photos.
Go here if you wish to see what I mean about Barrhaven. [update July 2005] Here is another article illustrating some of the bigger problems facing the suburb.