LIZ PETROVA
House of Paint Festival of Urban Art and Culture, Dunbar Bridge, Aug. 27, 2016
“I’m 32 and I live in Toronto now, but I grew up here. I spent my teen years here, from about 14 to 18. I started doing graffiti in Ottawa, and then I took a 10-year break, but now I think I’m having a mid-life crisis — mid-life in graffiti years — so I’m back.
“I’m feeling very sentimental to be back here and painting at the festival, especially after so many years away. I’m just trying to recapture the feeling of being 16 and really free, and discovering something and pushing your limits for creativity’s sake. And the muscle memory brings you right back to that moment. And it’s really meditative.
“There were no legal walls when I started. Before the O -Train came to town, we used to get up a lot in the train tunnels, and we used to paint here at Dunbar Bridge. And the Tech wall is always a mainstay of the graffiti landscape. It’s been around forever and has always been sort of sanctioned. But we weren’t allowed to paint there until my friends and I got pretty good. There’s kind of an unspoken tradition in the community, where if you’re not at a certain level of technique, you shouldn’t be taking up space in a prime location like that.
“Women are few and far between in graffiti. There are still barriers to entry, and I think that’s why you see so few ladies taking it up. I find graffiti is still quite a misogynistic culture. There’s an attitude to it that is aggressive and inherently
competitive. That may actually appeal to some girls, but for the most part I think it doesn’t. And because you don’t see a lot of women doing it, it’s hard for girls to start out, because if you don’t see anyone like yourself then there’s no role model. And just the act of taking up space and saying something really loudly is kind of curtailed when you’re a woman; you know, doing something illegal and putting your name all big on a wall is still maybe a little bit of a cultural barrier. Too bold.
“That’s generalizing, but I think that plays into it. In graffiti, it’s customary to paint with a crew — a bunch of people who are your friends, your squad, and that’s who you go out with and that’s who will look out for you, and that’s who battle it out with other graffiti artists. Not physically, but in a competitive way. And so for girls, because there are so few of us, it’s hard to be accepted into an allmale crew, and it’s hard to start a female crew. And a lot of the people who do graffiti are teenagers, teenage boys, so of course it’s a bit of a boys’ club. They love women, but I don’t think they love women who compete with them.”