Paint it black

Margot Giblin

THIS piece can be seen in Bidencope’s Lane, which really is in the inner city, wrapped around by many buildings, between Collins and Liverpool Streets, off Murray St.

The plan?

To paint it out. And continue to paint out anything unauthorized that replaces it.

It’s going to be a massive job. Every possible surface in the lane has been sprayed — images, tags and some ingenious use of functional parts of buildings.

Sandra Jones, Promotions Manager of Centrepoint Shopping Centre told Tasmanian Times the paint-out will be happening some time soon.

“There are people who come here to shop who are intimidated by what is in this alley. They say they don’t feel safe.”

Others with businesses in the lane are offended by the artists’ and writers’ use of their shop fronts as a canvas. When you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to have your shop present the exact, understated image you’re after it’s pretty maddening to have someone with a spray can come along and rework it.

Not all spaces are the same to the artists. There are prime spots — the eye-catching spots — and these aren’t shop fronts. Backs of buildings, otherwise bland parking lot walls, rears of a toilet blocks are all targeted but it is the space that hits the eye first as you come into the lane that is coveted.

Once such a space is taken it is left alone.

To paint over it would be to invite the same fate for that and every other piece of work known to be done by the offending person.

Parts of the lane are dark in the day time. How do the artists see what they’re doing at night? By the light of their mobile phones.

‘They live for it’, says a young man who isn’t into it himself, but lives with a fifteen year old who is.

He says it’ll take a year of consistent painting out of the night-time efforts to stop them. The reason the graffitists will eventually stop is that they want their pieces to be seen. No-one can take their best efforts being obliterated for ever.

Some businesses in Bidencope’s Lane aren’t fussed by the graffiti. The proprietor of Mona’s Sculptured Nails, who’s been there 20 years, thinks the people who do them are harmless.

“Nothing terrible has ever happened in this lane’, she said.