I parked the busted 89 Acura in a deserted industrial area and walked through fields of tall grass to a very quiet single line boxcar lay up. The smell of metal and grease hit me immediately as my eyes scanned the cars for graffiti. My heart swelled and adrenaline soared. I had arrived at a place unlike anywhere else, secret markings permeated the vast expanse of rust and metal. The colors of the graffiti reached out like beacons in the night. I had always admired the multicolored pieces from afar (as graffiti is usually best seen) but now in close quarters I was able to take in the eloquence of simple monikers delicately placed in the nooks and crannies of every car. They were quick drawings made in paint stick by loose hands. My little buddy who accompanied me had to explain to me that the drawings were the graffiti from the train workers and rail hoppers. This was an entirely different form of graffiti that existed in a uniquely parallel world with the postmodern graffiti subculture that I was raised in.



photo by Kirke Campbell



photo by Kirke Campbell


After we struggled to paint our pieces, having disproportionate levels of heart and skill, we walked the entirety of railroad tracks and breathed in the miles of markings. I suddenly stopped at a rusted red oxide CNW boxcar and had my first ever epiphany in graffiti. It was awakened inside me by a simple line drawing made with white paint stick. It was a picture of a man with a cowboy hat and had a caption underneath that read “Avoiding Catatonic Surrender”. Suddenly everything made sense. When people would ask why I wrote my name over and over again like a simple child I had the perfect answer: avoiding catatonic surrender. Suddenly my life was okay for a brief moment and all the frustrations and disappointments of real life slipped away as we walked over the jagged rocks and breathed in the dank air. I felt the beads of sweat drip down my face and as I got back into my car I knew that I would never be the same ever again. I asked my little buddy if he knew who did the Avoiding Catatonic Surrender drawing and he said it was The Colossus of Roads. I asked him how he knew who it was and he told me that he just knew that he saw his drawings every time he saw a train and that he had heard the artist was some old crazy man. That was the first time I realized that human beings other than young crazy kids participated in the dialogue of graffiti.

As I began to study the “folk art tradition” of monikers side by side with my all encompassing graffiti obsession I began to see the same names and images over and over. Imagery of a man with a cowboy hat was pretty much the meat and potatoes of the early rail car marking pioneers. Colossus of Roads aka buZ blurr aka Russell Butler, a 41 year railroad man changed the game by adding the dadaesque device of an ever changing caption to the bottom of his profile drawing of a man with a cowboy hat. He began to proliferate the North American railroad network with his omnipotent chalk marks or as he would call them “dispatches” in Late 1971. His first drawing was a gypsy sphinx which he would later change to the iconic cowboy profile and caption as early as ‘78. Each caption on each drawing would allude to some esoteric going on in the mind of the artist, it is like an intercontinental word or logic game played in the hearts and minds of rail car marking aficionados. I think this is what so endeared the art of Colossus of Roads to the masses. His drawings are all inclusive, they invite the spectator to be a part of the action and decipher what it all means. The medium is the massage and as the metal creaks and the sparks fly past a plethora of riddles cruise by hauling ass. You better be quick because you only have a few seconds to grab a hold of each one to decipher the existential wisdom as they pass:

dream deferred again, suspicious activity, monty cantsin, sorrow floats, moscow cats, surrounded by nazis, october in the railroad earth, Achilles back, despised poems, 4 students, trash inspirations, practice non certainty, graffiti culprit too, idle idyllist, scissors saturday, recession still over they say, aesthetics of indifference, discouraging words, primary textist, conceptualist monumental, face barking snitches, philosophy vs. religion, avoiding catatonic surrender, highly disliked, mancusi treatment, forced to the ladders by spray, Picasso jinxed, cyber phantasy, schnappsed synapses, fake truth, chance event 533 miles, despondency, patience + humility, tempting fate, brush hogs extinct.

2 sides to every boxcar.



photo by Fflave


Through the hand of fate I would end up striking up a correspondence with buZ blurr about half a decade later. At this point in time I had been back to the lay ups thousands of times and had participated in thousands of the Zen koans scribbled onto the sides of boxcars by Colossus. If you asked retired railroad man colossus what it all meant he would probably tell you that it was either an extension of an elaborate folk art tradition buried deep inside of him with the rust and metal in his blood or perhaps only a simple vulnerable extension of an actual obsessive compulsive disorder. Perhaps he is at a loss to describe his situation because a viable diagnosis hasn’t been made by modern society. He might say that his verbal communication skills are lacking while talking to the whole world all at once about the sacred and the profane. I would finally get a chance to receive correspondence from buZ in that same hand that I had seen adorn the sides of thousands of train cars.



photo by Fflav


Like a true Zen master he offered up no answers only questions. He also offered me little bits of ephemera and stamp sheets recreating recent art works. To me these letters were like getting correspondence from fucking Picasso. I sent him all my favorite works of art (which were probably still a bunch of crap) and he would always respond with kind words and humility. I tried to assuage his disdain for my generation of graffiti artists. He was less than impressed and told me: “You are right to detect that I am less than enamored with the state of the graffiti onslaught that is covering my work but since I came from a background of rancor and shame, it was inevitable that I would be lumped in with a despised group that has uglyfied an entire system. Being now a pariah from my origin of railroad man account being relegated to this recent trendy phenomenon thus negating a claim to an old folk art tradition…”



photo by Kirke Campbell



photo by Kirke Campbell


I must have been crushed by this and although I no longer have my end of the correspondence I’m sure I begged for the blessing of my generation and assured him that most of us understood the differences between our times and that the majority of people I knew had nothing but veneration and respect for Colossus and his colleagues. The response I received back was so full of truth and humility that it mad me respect my idol even more: “Sounds like I stepped on some toes pretty hard. Didn’t mean to offend, sometimes I forget my own Zen mantra of know honor, but keep to the role of the disgraced. My start was motivated out of a powerless and isolated alienation from a dead end existence. My dispatches were ersatz escapes.”



photo by Kirke Campbell (click for larger image)


It was heavy stuff to lay on me. I was amazed that this guy in his sixties, a veritable graffiti guru, still felt disenfranchised and isolated as me. It truly made me realize that we really are all the same no matter how you look at it. Besides enlightening me on the history of the art form I have come to be obsessed with buZ has also consoled me with his kind words and generous train dispatches when I was at my lowest points. He always reminds me to keep moving and not to find permanent solutions to temporary problems. The Colossus of Roads will always be here and even in his twilight years continues to mold and shape today’s youth in a positive way. Still plagued by the eternal question of whether his dispatches are grist for the soul’s mill or simply and extension of Aspergers Syndrome he remains uniquely human, and this is a trait which cannot be said of the many artists who try to replicate his style within my generation. Perhaps this is why his art has remained dear to my heart as I’ve traversed the long course from childhood to adult hood. He makes me feel like its okay to have these infinite unanswerable questions about existence as long as I keep highballing on the train of life.



photo and work by KAI1


Here is a bit of recent correspondence from early this year. I guess I must have asked him how he was doing. “Still in the Old and Die Phase of my life, still struggling with the dualities of the missus’s wish for a steady state clean and neat house, and my own mess-making process of stencil cutting, painting, stamp sheet making, etc. Still struggling with the championing of free expression, and the ill reaction of revulsion at the foul language and rude drawings on the outside of your big package, knowing my delicate blonde mail person peruses my stuff, and the raised brow of the missus, and the question of where we going to put this stuff. Still struggling with a compulsive disorder and the need to continue more and more mail solicitation. Still have the ambition of filling the Ford with keys, still have the obsession to tag every freight car. Still living up to the nickname my father gave me 'Brush' by building brush piles in Papercide Park, still adding to the 'bucket list' of things to do before the hereafter I’m gone. Still working on the mound as a testament to the amount of biodegradable material that is needed to make soil, still embarrassed by how small the mound is after 43 years of work on it. Still struggling along on my pension as only income, where as if I could sell some of my product (framed pieces) I would have an excuse to make more.”



photo by Kirke Campbell (click for larger image)


Keep making your art sir, keep filling the Ford, keep making a mess, keep adding to your pile and I will keep my eye out for your bits of existential wisdom flying by on the line ready to save my life when I least expect it.


KAI1

Kirke Campbell - www.flickr.com/photos/29013921@N00/



photo and work by KAI1 (click for larger image)