>> After taking graffiti to the end of the line,
Montreal painter Omen changes tracks
with his Jazzed Up! exhibition

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Anyone with an eye for graffiti in this town will recognize the name Omen. On the Plateau and well beyond, a wall he’s hit is instantly recognizable for his distinctive approach to the art form, one that ignores all the codes and conventions of hip hop graffiti. His faces--he always does faces, almost always in black and white--seem to hang ghostlike in the gloom, at once starkly photographic and sublimely intangible.

With his new exhibition Jazzed Up!, a series of oversized, photo-based jazz portraits at Blizzarts, Omen has moved from outdoor walls to those indoors, but his sensibility remains intact. “Back before modern photography, people were relying on a better type of photography,” Omen tells me as we sit in his studio, surrounded by aerosol images of Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and others in various stages of completion. “It was all black and white, no colour, and that’s perfect for what I do. It’s about the essence. Anything good is usually about the essence. In this case it’s the essence of the image and of the jazz musicians. Especially John Coltrane. God, I could do the whole show just on him. He was so photogenic, so intense, even when he got older.”

It was the Blue Note album jackets of the ’60s that particularly inspired Omen in this endeavour. Simple, powerful duo-tone designs that played intense black-and-white photos off daring decisions in composition and type, those covers took a shortcoming--limited budgets demanding a minimalist vision--and flipped it over into a strength, an effectiveness rarely paralleled since.

“I’d hoped to use more Blue Note stuff as reference, but I haven’t got my hands on enough of them yet. A friend’s going to lend me the book of Blue Note covers. Another friend lent me CDs, books and magazines. I have here every single jazz book that they had at the Montreal Library--which is sad, because anyone coming in to town for the Jazz Fest has no reference books to borrow.

“I’m really picky in a way. There are great photos, and then there are the photos that work for me. I swear, I went through 3,000 photos and barely found five that worked.”

Freaking on streaking
Such ruthless reduction is indicative of Omen’s purity of vision, a vision that’s duly earned him the number-1 graf-artist spot in the Mirror’s Best of Montreal three years running--ironic because it’s been almost that long since Omen hit an actual wall, here or anywhere. In fact, his artistic drive had all but dried up until very recently, when he took can in hand again for this show.

“I haven’t hit a street in years. For a long time, I was only doing freight trains. We’d go to different yards in the city and across the province and hit up freights. We had our secret spots, which I’m not going to talk about. After walls, freights became everything because they moved. The idea that the freights you hit, one’s in Houston now, another in L.A. and another down south in Florida, and everyone’s seeing your stuff--it was monumental to me, and an obsession in the sense that I had to do it and couldn’t really explain it.”

Just as he had graduated from tagging (quickly scribbled nicknames) to bombing (complex mini-murals), and from city streets to train yards, so did Omen move deeper into a graffiti subculture called streaking, one with ties to the train-hopping hobo culture of the Great Depression. Two years ago, he and fellow writer (graffiti artist) Other undertook an odyssey through the southern U.S. They visited likeminded can commandos in Austin, Jacksonville and Philadelphia, and availed themselves of the rail yards at hand.

“We were doing freights the whole time, and I’d been reduced to streaking with Mark-Alls, which are like oil sticks but they’re super-chemical, used for marking metal. They dry in 20 minutes and last four to five times longer than spray paint. They’ll last indefinitely if they’re used on the right spot on a freight. I’ve seen streaks from ’78, ’76 sometimes.

“Streaking is mostly for hoboes, a form of communication in hobo culture, done strictly on trains. It’s not the old, depression-era hobo sign language--the symbols for ‘kind woman,’ ‘mean dog,’ ‘you can sleep here’--which is still in effect in some yards. Streaking isn’t that aspect, it’s the actual signature of the hobo on the train. They’re called monikers. Your moniker is whatever your little symbol is. Ox, the Soul Artist, Herbie--these are all familiar monikers that anyone who’s a rail fan has seen over and over. Mine was a face, ironically enough.”

Writer’s block
Omen returned to Montreal in January of 2001, the depth of winter--not a good time to crack out the cans and get back into the swing of writing. Fate quickly dealt him something of a wild card. “I had the opportunity to go to India for free. As any marginally sane person would, I took it. I got to open a children’s art school. I was in charge of planning a curriculum, teaching students and going into this huge monstrosity of an abandoned textile mill and saying, what should we put here? A painting studio? It was 2,000 square feet with huge, stonework walls, vaulted ceilings and a back patio with monkeys and a garden.”

What seemed like a pass to paradise soon became an exercise in misery for Omen. His stay in Modinagar, India, blew up into a Bollywood epic of petty treachery, corruption and general confusion, not to mention raw sewage, random industrial noise-bursts and bulk batches of mismatched paint. By April, he was back in Montreal, already unsure of what direction to take next, artistically. “Then I went to the Quebec City riots and got shot,” he exclaims, showing off his rubber-bullet scars. “I couldn’t walk for three weeks. I can’t skate anymore. Bastards! That’s when I started getting all screwed up. I hit a wall,” he says, not at all in the graffiti sense of the phrase.

The writer’s block that Omen faced was the product of an interrupted evolution. He’d taken the idea of graffiti to a far and obscure point, only to find his train of thought derailed. “I came back and I wanted to spray-paint but I didn’t have the fire in me anymore. I didn’t even draw, I still can’t read. It was some weird mental block. I was anxiety-ridden over it for several months. It was tumultuous.

“In India I was somebody. I was a consultant with the engineers and the Modi family, the people who had brought me over. I had power--power!--but it was good power, building an art school and pushing for the students. Then I came back here and I was just another honky walking the streets. I didn’t even paint, so I was just a citizen again.”

Killing Omen
It was at that point that Omen faced the possibility that his career as an artist was over. His as-yet-incomplete fine arts studies infuriated him in the way they so completely contradicted his philosophy as a graffiti artist. He considered shifting over to architecture (somehow very appropriate for a graf writer), took a running leap at admission into an architecture program, only to be rejected. A heartbreak, but at the same time perhaps an omen for Omen.

“I was going to do a final show so that I could make some money and then just kill Omen, leave for another city and study architecture--be legitimized.”

That hope was dashed, but Omen remained obligated to the nightclub Blizzarts, and to himself, to produce a show’s worth of canvasses. It is perhaps there, at Blizzarts, the club that first allowed Omen to bring his work indoors (a magnificent mural of his still hangs on the club’s back wall), that Omen may yet find his legitimacy. A genuine legitimacy, that of a remarkable artist permitted not only to bring his work to the public but to get something back.

Perhaps that was the plan all along. Omen got into graf later than most of his peers in the milieu. He had already invested years into art studies, drawing and painting prolifically, when he first took can in hand.

“The only art that made sense, at the time, was graffiti. It’s free art, it jives with my view that the people should have their art. Every museum, every permanent collection of religious bullshit, you have to pay for. Kids have no viable means for exposure and self-expression. Everything’s controlled by advertising--McDonald’s this, Nike that. Graffiti said, here I am, an individual putting himself up on this wall, beautifying this piece-of-crap, straight, grey wall.

“I had come back from the Yukon, in ’96, when I first started spray-painting. Everyone says Montreal’s a beautiful city, but it’s a city and cities are inherently ugly. The beauty of a city isn’t in the city itself but in the people and their interaction with their city.”

On the one hand, Omen has an inherent understanding of graffiti’s raison d’être--the reclamation of the individual’s visual space, the victory of colour and life over dull, oppressive concrete, the glorious magnification of that simplest and most profound of English sentences, “I am.”

On the other hand, he understands rent and Hydro bills. He understands that to achieve completeness as an artist means that one’s life must be completely art, and that means selling (add the “out” if you really must). And, although hard-pressed to articulate it, he understands that his voice is strong and unique enough to transcend its context.

“You’re only a sell-out if people buy. It’s like if you have a talent for surgery and you ask for money, are you a sell-out? I like stupid things like eating, hygiene, paying bills and not living ghetto-style anymore. There’s nothing wrong with that. If I’m going to stay in my chosen field of the visual arts, I don’t want to be pigeonholed as the guy who does faces on walls with a spray-paint can. I’ve paid my dues. Literally paid, because of the fines. I don’t feel any regret.” :

Jazzed Up! vernissage at Blizzarts on Thursday, July 11, 5pm. The works remain up until July 31. Omen can be contacted at omen_one@hotmail.com