4

The urban canvas

In the pre-Olympics era of the early 1990s, metro Atlanta was a peculiar dichotomy. Its population was exploding but the inner city had reached its nadir, in terms of population. Great swaths of Atlanta seemed barren and left behind, like a playground for mischief.

Riding MARTA trains to Lenox Square, Brewer and friends noticed that a subculture of scofflaw artists (many of them Atlanta College of Art students) had been spray-painting their aliases — Haze, Boost and so forth — on billboards, buildings and any dingy nook they could get away with defacing. To Brewer it looked like the old-school New York subway graffiti that had fascinated him since he’d seen it featured on a PBS documentary.

He itched to participate but was clueless how: Where do we get the right paint? What are the rules?

Back then, before the city abolished them, a few designated walls around Atlanta allowed graffitists to legally practice in public. In those pre-Internet days, Brewer's only means of learning how to paint graffiti was to hang out at these walls and watch, in awe, as the guys behind the monikers maneuvered cans, making their two-dimensional works pop off concrete.

Soon it was time to stop watching and start spraying.

One day Brewer and company shoplifted cans of Rust-Oleum and Krylon, and bee-lined for the nearest underpass, the Freedom Parkway bridge. Their first attempts at writing graffiti were terrible, just squiggles that taggers quickly painted over — a sign of disrespect from their experienced peers. They took their lumps and moved on, continuing to explore.

Many of Brewer's earliest canvases were in such forgotten pockets of town he had no fear of painting in broad daylight. He and his friends roamed abandoned industrial complexes, marveling at smokestacks and massive warehouse doors consumed by kudzu. By night, they climbed billboard ladders, painted freight trains and wrote atop buildings —the more visible from interstates and MARTA, the better. The early pieces, like most graffiti, were exercises in typography. So Brewer needed about five good letters that would be his calling card.

He'd tried a couple of aliases that didn’t feel right: Stoop, Noise, others. He wanted something that sounded cool but wasn't a silly, arbitrary word. Flipping through a dictionary one day, an entry jumped out: hence. He liked each of the five capitalized letters, but after a couple of test-runs, the aesthetics of the "c" seemed off, so he made a substitution, and set off writing "HENSE" across Atlanta.

Brewer's quest to dominate the local graffiti scene bordered on obsession. He felt pride in his growing criminal portfolio, convinced he was taking part in some kind of Gen-X rebellion. He’d venture into woebegone pockets of town and abandoned buildings at night, alone and terrified.

"That was really nerve-wracking, because it's difficult to try to focus on your work and think about not being seen, and watching out for crackheads and people like that," he said. "But I never had any problems."

The proliferation of HENSE graffiti made an impression on Taylor Means, a 27-year-old painter who grew up in Decatur. "You'd see it along highways, bridges, underpasses, overpasses," said Means. "I was impressed with how much of his work I saw around town, and thought it was kind of a phenomenon."

Graffiti is a game of being "up," a turf-war of temporary victories and vandalistic disregard, but from the get-go Brewer saw a deeper purpose in his illicitness; it would be his training ground and launching pad. Some of the first graffitists to inspire him — Dave Kinsey, a local artist who painted as Lern, and breakout stars like Shepard Fairey — had begun showing in galleries and getting paid commissions. He knew, eventually, he wanted to tackle large works, both indoors and out.

While hanging off bridges and the backs of billboards, or rolling paint over huge walls in abandoned railroad corridors, he was learning to work his whole arm — whole body — into the lines, to handle textural surface changes and the shifting geometry of urban architecture, grappling with rain, wind, cold, suffocating humidity, poison ivy, mosquitoes and the constant threat of arrest. Often, he’d look down to train tracks or streets several stories below and think, "This is not wise."

There were some arrests. Brewer grudgingly talks about them, calling them cases of "wrong place, wrong time" and "ancient history." His first night in jail came at age 18, and his last at 21, resulting in sentences of community service. In recent years, a concentrated crackdown by Atlanta police — and the appointment of an officer solely dedicated to tracking and wrangling graffiti writers — has resulted in more severe penalties for today’s graffitists, including felony charges.

Looking back, Brewer considers his arrests embarrassing episodes he’d rather forget, not badges of street-cred honor. That kid in abandoned buildings at midnight was, he says, "an idiot, frankly."

In the same way he ducked authorities, Brewer had always tried to keep his graffiti secret from his family — and largely he succeeded. He recalls being in the car with his parents, driving by prominent HENSE pieces and crossing his fingers they didn't connect the dots. His open-minded folks would support creativity in any form, he knew, but not breaking the law.

"We had very little knowledge of exactly what he was doing," his father says with a chuckle. "Even as of today, he hasn't shared everything."

After high school, Brewer studied art at Virginia Commonwealth University but dropped out after only one semester. Formalized art studies somehow didn't feel right, and he was too consumed with Atlanta’s graffiti culture to be so far away.

Concerned by Brewer's decision to quit college, Bill Brewer advised his son that work ethic alone wouldn’t cut it in the art world.

You can't rely on your neighborhood, man, the elder Brewer would say, during their frequent long talks. Allow yourself to go as far as you can go and expose yourself to as much as you can, because that's the only way, in art, that you'll be able to do well.