This clandestine trail I’m on has been travelled many times before me, worn down is the path through the tall grasses, footprints from perhaps an hour ago or from last night are still fresh in the cool black soot covered sands. Detritus lays all around me from past settlers, the forgotten and homeless and a new breed of youth desperate to leave their Krylon impressions. I am rewarded for my perseverance and curiosity. Each concrete hurdle I must go around and not over, each corner I must circumvent discovering a still rarer species of human expression. The deeper I forge the more extravagant and beautiful the creature evolves, brandishing its array of strokes and gestures, its defiance, its voice.

This is a language of symbols, of colour, of hieroglyphics, a code orchestrated in one harmonious crescendo of visual communication. It represents an urban story rooted in a tribal history of culture, race, religion, beliefs, statue, power and riches. It has only begun.

I must return now to my daily route of work and family. I hurry back for fear of being lost, of having ventured too far into the unknown. I’m elated and out of breath. I’ve witnessed and am an accomplice ( a voyeur) in a right of passage of leaving one’s mark, creating one’s proper history, of graffiti as old as the cave paintings of Lascaux and the photographs of Brassaï, as young as the drawings of Keith Haring and the paintings of Basquiat – the latter some dare call not art but vandalism. Vandalism is the art of selling something labelled as art in an institution labelled as a gallery or museum. Graffiti is an art that needs no institutional walls or support and only requires the surface it is destined upon, to carry its head high above a world trapped in propaganda, iconic imagery, publicity and 1-minute news bites.

Don’t be fooled, graffiti is not an art for you and me because we cannot fully understand nor appreciate the drive and vision it takes to fulfil such a daunting task. Those who make it do and offer it to us for free. If you stare straight ahead long enough you’ll eventually get to where you think you want to go. I encourage you on your next voyage to look a little more to your left or right, up over across under and down, and you just might catch a glimpse of this elusive and rare beauty I call the art of graffiti.