The Writing on the Wall

Graffiti artists have taken street art into galleries and onto murals.

By Joan Tapper

Kelly Graval, aka Risk, has a lot going on these days. The multimedia artist, color field muralist, and pioneer of street art on the West Coast is working on two retrospective exhibits. One is for the Chase Contemporary Gallery in New York. The other is for the California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks (CMATO), now located at The Oaks, just a few miles from the home Graval bought a dozen years ago on the street where his wife grew up.

There’s a lot going on there, too: The print shop where he produces his limited-edition prints is being moved from one end of the house to a new space above his studio, prompting major renovations in the residence; in the metal shop an assistant is polishing old tools and keys for the outer skin of a mixed-media shark that is destined for a gallery exhibit. And all around the double-lot property huge palms and other plants are waiting to be planted. “I’m trying to make the whole place like a jungle,” Graval says of his unique space for creating art. Meanwhile, he is planning a huge mural that will soon go up in downtown Thousand Oaks.

The creative spirit of Kelly “Risk” Graval shows through in the range of his work—from a miniature, handheld billboard to an array of neon and other colorful images to a supersize signature color-wash wall.

He’s also the subject of two documentaries in progress, perhaps not surprising when you consider how dramatically his career has evolved over the past three decades. Born in 1967 and originally from Louisiana, Graval grew up in the Los Angeles area, where he soon launched his graffiti career as Risk—a name he adopted from the board game—and headed a crew known as West Coast Artists. In 1988 he traveled to New York and painted on subway cars, but when he returned to Los Angeles he translated that work to freeway overpasses. Pushed by his father to pursue a business major at USC, he earned a fine arts degree there instead, but he’s always had a strong entrepreneurial streak. In 1992 he started Third Rail Clothing, a street art–inspired company he ran for years. And he kept creating artwork that appeared in music videos, on albums, and in magazines. By the mid-2000s, however, he was turning more to gallery work and, eventually, murals.

Graval’s style was changing as well, away from letters of his street name toward color-wash abstractions. He was painting in London with some other iconic artists for a project connected to the Olympics, he remembers, when a colleague asked what made him happiest. He began to wonder: “Could I evoke emotion without letters?” The answer was yes, and these days his murals are fields of color in his trademark bright spray-paint palette.

Last year he took on the curation of art featured inside The Mayfair Hotel in downtown L.A., showcasing an artist and a different medium on each floor and setting up a gallery with changing exhibits that Graval continues to oversee. He’s also still fine-tuning the setting for what’s sure to be a rooftop pool-bar hot spot.

Evan Mendel stops in front of his downtown Ventura mural— an inspired tribute to the cosmetology school it graces.

The range of his work will be on exhibit on April 11, when his retrospective opens at CMATO. “I’ll do a timeline,” Graval says. One room will be dedicated to a color-wash mural. There will also be mixed media—a shark or a car or a large sculpture that harks back to the Ferus Gallery artists, like Ed Kienholz, of the 1960s. “I’m looking forward to the exit to the gift shop, too,” he says, for which he might create pillows, limited-edition prints, or skateboards—accessible objects for sale. “I want to do cool stuff.” Where Risk is concerned, that undoubtedly goes without saying.

What Risk has done is to give a road map to someone like me,” says Evan Mendel, a 31-year-old painter and muralist whose work is visible on walls in Ventura, around L.A., and in Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone. “He showed me what’s possible.”

Mendel, who grew up in Simi Valley and lives in Oxnard, was always into drawing and skateboarding graphics. Self-taught, he did graffiti but as he got older, he realized that wasn’t his path, though “I wanted to paint big and have other people see it,” he says.

I wanted to paint big and have other people see it.

Inspired by the collaborative murals of artists El Mac and Augustine Kofie, Mendel created what he calls a “starter mural” for a homeless shelter in Hollywood. But he got his first taste of bigger projects when he assisted a couple of Brazilian artists working on a six-story building in L.A. He began querying building owners about using their property for his work and searched Google maps for likely walls to use. Eventually he got permission to do a mural in Ventura and connected with an organization called Beautify Earth, which helped with expenses. Of the several murals he’s produced since, including one in Koreatown, Mendel says he’s most proud of the huge eye-catching creation of a beautiful woman with flowing tresses on the wall of a cosmetology school at the corner of Thompson Boulevard and California Street in Ventura.

In his studio nearby, Mendel is also working on paintings that mix figures with abstraction and experimenting with oil sketches based on old photographic portraits. He remains excited about street work, however. “There’s a certain movement among young artists who see murals as a way to get their art out there,” he says. “It’s trendy. It’s public. You don’t have to go through a gallery establishment. It’s out there for everyone.”