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Tim Clorius is a tall German-born painter who moved to Maine to complete his undergraduate studies at the Maine College of Art. In addition to works on canvas, he makes mural and conceptual pieces as a graffiti artist and community organizer under the moniker S.U.B.O.N.E. (Supplying Urban Beautification Offering New Experiences).
Tell me about your work in the community.
Kids connect to their neighborhood. If they build a mural in their neighborhood, every time they walk to school and they see it, they feel good about themselves. I want to build a graffiti wall with the kids, really show them how to do it. The outcome is not to be judged by the quality, but by the experience the participants have. They feel they can change something.
That’s just as much a process of beautification. The sense of potential in urban space changes in the kids’ minds.
We don’t have to be so much educators as collaborators with kids. It might take weeks or months, but they’ll get insight into how it all works.
The [recently awarded Maine Arts Commission] grant [for a mural piece with young artists] is just one step. There ultimately is potential for a creative-economy type of business. We are all professional artists. We have insight into the contemporary art world. We take it seriously and demystify the world for young students. They can go into a museum and understand the process in a new way.
Many students don’t get an opportunity for that understanding of process and intent until high school, if not college.
Exactly. What helps is we have the graffiti. The kids know me and there is a certain initial respect between us. First I can talk to them about graffiti and at that point it’s like they have licked the stamp and are involved.
With the last six-month painting project, I saw the kids change. At first they were sloppy, doing it quickly. The farther we got the more they could envision where it’s going to go, the more passionate they got. By the end they were correcting me and protecting their work.
Jan Piribek approached me because she does similar projects such as the Bayside Mural. I was already working with Andy [Coffin — artist and arts program director for Portland Parks and Recreation]. Jan does GPS data-log work of certain activities or paths that people take and makes beautiful digital prints out of the graphically represented data. We have an opportunity to project a huge S.U.B.O.N.E. piece. It’s invisible but it’s in the coordinates, it’s there.
So you’re putting your flag down in a completely virtual environment?
The idea is still the same. Another community project is the fence commissioned for the Munjoy Hill Community Center. They ripped it down. It divided the board. The issue was that many members of the community loved it and felt it represented the Hill’s openness to all types of culture and other people were concerned about the connection to gangs and violence, urban decay.
