street art

Grit Gospel

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The ministry of making art in Appalachia

–by Final Girl

Sleep, My Brother

 

For miles, I had been searching for a canvas.

All I had seen on the morning drive through Pennsylvania was one tag on a highway bridge. I had noticed it because of the typewriter-style letters. The tag was Sleep. Strange, I thought. I remembered it. Sleep.

And soon it was almost evening in West Virginia, almost home, almost too late to do a piece. So I went for it, turned off the highway into the unknown. I just drove. I didn’t know where I was going. When I passed a little gravel turnoff with a sloppy grouping of concrete pylons, I thought: a decent canvas; if I don’t find anywhere else, I’ll turn back.

*** Continue reading →

Grit Gospel

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The ministry of making art in Appalachia

–by Final Girl

 

In the Mountains that used to be Magic

 

 

A buck lives in my neighborhood.
It’s not a neighborhood really, just a scattering of houses by the highway.  At night you can hear the freight trains.  I don’t know my neighbors, only by their trash.  It’s not really in town, but not rural enough either for a deer of this size, not this size—large enough to be legendary.  To be the subject of stories, the object of at least one hunter’s obsession.  I’ve seen the buck twice: a startled head, rack flashing like a white mast in the trees.

There are so many mysteries: where he goes, how he lives.  How old is he?  How long has he been here?  How long will he last?  He gives me something to root for, the buck.  He helps me dream of something undiscovered still in these settled hills. Continue reading →

Grit Gospel

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The ministry of making art in Appalachia

–by Final Girl

Why I Stay

Three brown tires are on the bank of the river, like shells would be on the beach of another place. This is not that place.

It is hard to deny some of the beauty of Appalachia: rolling roads, haze on the fields, morning-green hills, horses. Other beauty is tricky. You have to train your eye—or, you have to have a certain eye already.

I don’t believe the broken-down bus mars the sunset. I think it makes it, morning glory twisting around the rims. Pokeberries stain the farmhouse purple; we threw them against its side. There is a kind of beauty in giving up. There is a sort of joy in why the hell not. Continue reading →

Grit Gospel

Posted on by

The ministry of making art in Appalachia

–by Final Girl

 

VINE

IMG_5068

His prostitute was released from jail today.

He would be upset if I called her his. He would yell, protest.  But he paid for her.  I saw the letters. I saw the videos, which he kept—his hands on her tiny, tattooed breasts: a large, green scorpion scrabbling across her chest. Continue reading →

Grit Gospel

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I’m a street artist who lives and works in one of the poorest counties in the country. My work has appeared on abandoned and neglected structures throughout the rural Appalachian hills.  I make beauty from the broken. I see resilience in the ruined. I paint images of women, primarily using my own body as a model, in positions and attitudes of strength, solidarity and resistance. I never went to school for this. Paint is my calling. Rust is my church. Deer, crickets and coyotes: my congregation.  Every wall is an altar. Every moonlit night is Sunday. Grit Gospel is the ministry of making art in Appalachia.

 

by Final Girl

To Unsee / See

 

I started by following the hearts.

I’m not sure when I first noticed graffiti, when it made its initial undeniable impression on me, but I remember the hearts because I documented them. I took pictures. Here was a spray-painted white heart on a fence. Here was a pink one on a garage.

Then I noticed someone was writing with paint on doors and alleys and the back of signs, even on manhole covers: Beautiful. You are beautiful.

Then I wondered who that someone was.

Heart

Continue reading →