Jasper Ellis designed the watermelon mural that now covers the bowl at the MacArthur Island skatepark in Kamloops. It's one piece of an overall effort to cover the skatepark in graffiti art.

(LEVI LANDRY / iNFOnews.ca)

Landon Muzio has been trying to paint over the MacArthur Island skatepark for years, and now it’s finally started.

He’s been skateboarding for 28 years and he’s also a graffiti artist.

The ramps, transitions and bowl are now covered in murals he painted alongside his friend, Jasper Ellis.

"It was a last minute decision. We only had five days to paint the park," Muzio said. So me and my friend Jasper got a few volunteers to go at it."

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Muzio has worked on other murals around Kamloops, including the new downtown piece featuring local pro skateboarder Matt Berger.

Muzio owns 808 and Bench, a downtown skate shop, and he’s the president of the Kamloops Skateboard Association. About two and a half weeks ago, the group painted several pieces at the park. Some feature artwork already known among skaters, others came from Ellis's creative mind.

"I decided to go with known images from skateboard decks we saw at the park," Muzio said. "(Ellis's) approach on art is much more original... and I've seen him evolve over the years."

The Kamloops Graffiti Task Force is praising the work as “real art,” setting it apart from the tags it removes around the city on a daily basis.

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"We just want to showcase that graffiti art can be good, because we're tired of the garbage we're seeing around," executive director Ronnie Bouvier said. "I'm hoping it stays nice, but we've got our eye on it."

Bouvier said the task force has removed 117,984 square feet of graffiti from Kamloops, or two football fields worth of wall space.

She’s found the vast majority of tags, often consisting of crude drawings and writing, are done by youth.

"Our most prolific graffiti tag this year is penises," she said. "And they're not even anatomically correct."

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She often hires university students to help clean graffiti over the summer. Among some of their frequent spots, Bouvier said her crews have cleaned graffiti-filled walls at the Pioneer Park washroom five times in the last two weeks.

"We don't see any artistry, we just see a bunch of garbage," she said. Instead, she said they find "phallic symbols, racism, bullying and drug messaging."

The graffiti art, however, is something she hopes will deter future taggers that respect the artist’s work.

Muzio painted the "Grosso" pigeon (right), inspired by a pro Anti-Hero deck named after the late rider Jeff Grosso. Ellis painted a piece (centre) depicting an original winged character he designed. On the left, a mural is dedicated to the memory of a local young rider, Kierra Davies.

(LEVI LANDRY / iNFOnews.ca)

"I just wanted to showcase what local artists in town are capable of and they don't have to be painted with the same brush as vandals," Bouvier said.

Ellis said the artists have left over paint to cover over any tags, but it’s not uncommon for another artist to paint over someone’s work. The unwritten rule among graffiti artists, he said, is the next person should “one up” the last piece that was there.

"If you can do something better, it's okay to do it," Ellis said.

They met about 14 years ago when Ellis moved to Kamloops. At the time, Muzio was tagging train cars, but he's since moved on to bigger, commissioned projects. Ellis is planning to launch an art show in the fall where he'll showcase his canvas art.

"I don't really stop creating things," Ellis said. "I create my own creatures in my own world."

They’re planning to return for more pieces at the skatepark, but there are at least a half-dozen so far, covering both tags and its lifeless concrete.

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