Having twice scrubbed graffiti off its 25-foot long delivery truck, Jake Gordon, co-owner of Imagine That! Furniture at South Meadows, turned to creative home stylist Ashey Peck for a solution.
Blank walls be they buildings or panel trucks prove an irresistible lure to taggers. They're called vandals in the U.S., but in Europe grafitti is the art of the 21st century, says Peck.
"The truck was just a blank canvas," she adds. "To us, as artists, the solution was to put art on it."
And now that the truck bears murals signed by the painters' bold tags it's become off limits to casual taggers, says Gordon. "They all recognize each other's tags. And respect them."
But the paint job serves a second purpose.
"It's a statement about who we are," says Gordon. "Our philosophy is to be unpredictable. When the truck is out we want it to be representative of what we do inside."
On the downside, the four murals took a week.
"We basically stopped delivery and turned the parking lot into an art gallery," says Gordon, who paid the four artists, collectively called TBK, $1,000 and gave them total creative freedom.
"The truck embodies our store slogan," says Gordon: "Creative confidence means creative freedom."
