Some people bring a journal on vacation. I brought spray cans, and apparently that impulse does not stay home just because the humidity triples.
I felt like painting. That is really the entire story here, no bigger philosophy attached. Somewhere deep in the jungle, with green pressing in on every side and nothing around to judge the composition but the trees, the urge showed up the way it always does, uninvited and immediate, and I followed it. Graffiti started as a way to leave a mark on a surface that was not supposed to hold one, and there is something honest about doing it somewhere with no audience at all, just heat, bugs, and a wall that had never seen a paint can before.
If the studio version of this instinct interests you more than the jungle version, I covered the street art scene at Art Basel in Miami, which is the exact opposite environment. Concrete instead of canopy, a crowd instead of silence, but the same itch underneath it.
