They don’t wait for the cover of darkness, for they have nothing to hide. They leave at 4pm on a sunny weekday, in shorts and

T-shirts, carrying bags overflowing with paint tins, rollers and spray cans past police officers who don’t look twice. They do this four or five times a week, but here’s the hard part – finding free space to paint in a city where every wall is a canvas.

There’s a patch of beige wall down a side street off a main thoroughfare. Doesn’t look like much, but it’ll do. One rings the doorbell and asks if he can paint the wall. He points to a mural further down the street – his credentials. It’s a 20-second conversation. Did he get permission? “Sort of,” he

In a colourful tale of two cities, the lines are sharply drawn between Brisbane’s crackdown on street art and its contrasting elevation to pride of place in Chile’s cultural capital, Valparaiso.

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smiles, dunking a roller in vibrant yellow paint. “He’s not the owner, but they liked the other one I did, so it should be okay.”

They start painting, with the occasional flick of a wrist to add an accent or shadow. The cans hiss and then rattle, the rollers quietly squeak. People walk by; some glance at the wall. One man has a good look but doesn’t break stride.

“Es bueno!” he calls to the painters.They are equally celebrated and chastised

for what they do. Because the line they walk is thin and blurred between art and vandalism, crime and culture. This is Valparaiso, Chile, the city that learned to love graffiti.

Before he was “Brisbane’s Banksy”, Anthony Lister was a small boy colouring in on his first

day of school. The kid in grade one at Mitchelton State School in the city’s north-west had chosen his path, or it had chosen him, by home time. “I remember colouring in a tiger and feeling very proud of it,” Lister tells Qweekend from an apartment in Sydney’s Kings Cross. “And from then on I felt like that was the identity I was adopting.”

Lister, who prefers the title “adventure painter” to street artist, grew up in Keperra, in Brisbane’s northern suburbs, middle child to a single mother of modest means. He learnt about art from his paternal grandmother, also a painter, who would

give him “really crap paper” to draw on. When the paper ran out, Lister used the streets. “I guess I just naturally had an inkling for scratching into things,” he says.

Now 36, Lister is, along with Britain’s Banksy, one of the world’s most influential street artists and his works sell for tens of thousands. Pink, Hugh Jackman and Geoffrey Rush are among the celebrities who have purchased pieces. He has sold out exhibitions from London to New York City. But his approach has also occasionally put him on the wrong side of the law. Last month, Lister fronted Brisbane Magistrates Court to respond to a charge of wilful damage by graffiti

as a result of his painting on five publicly visible surfaces around Brisbane between 2009 and 2014.

Lister admitted painting two Fortitude Valley walls, a Paddington skate park wall, a city fire hose box and a steel garage door in Brisbane’s CBD. He pleaded not guilty, arguing his work was street art, not graffiti, and he had sought to “beautify” the sites, not damage them. Magistrate Barry Cosgrove found against Lister for four of the five installations but did not record a conviction. He was ordered to pay $440 restitution to Brisbane City Council and perform five hours of community service with the council’s graffiti removal service within 12 months.

After sentencing, Lister donated $4560 to the

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WARPAINT

“Valparaiso is such a paintable city. You can paint anywhere and it just goes

with the colours of the city.A L R A M I R E Z , V A L P A R A I S O

G R A F F I T I A D V O C A T E

was not only one of the first artists to volunteer, he also painted more boxes than any other artist. His name appeared all over Brisbane and it was the start of his painting career.”

Since then the relationship between the council and Lister has been one of ups and downs that, in most recent years, has nosedived. “The council that celebrates me and asks me to take hold of a craft, to take hold of an ideal and actually be a leader in inspiring others, turns around and says ‘too much’. And not only that, but ‘you’re a criminal now’,” Lister says. “It’s kind of like your father slapping you in the face after you bring him some food he asked for.”

Hinchliffe says Lister has faced “persecution”. “What needs to be understood is that Lister does a variety of work; much of it is commissioned but occasionally he has painted murals on derelict walls in degraded commercial parts of cities without owners’ permission. The owners of these buildings have let them deteriorate wilfully. Lister actually beautifies some of the most degraded commercial parts of our inner city … I can’t think of anyone who has done more to animate some of Brisbane’s most unloved walls.”

Lister is not the only Brisbane street artist whose will to enliven the city’s most tired spaces has landed him in trouble. Fintan Magee, who grew up in inner-city West End, has had his trademark large murals, including those

commemorating the 2011 Queensland floods, displayed in galleries – and on city walls – around the world. But he has also been arrested five times, served many hours of community service and paid several fines. Like Lister, he has seen both sides of the divide – having public works commissioned and celebrated, and uninvited projects removed.

Cr Adams says the issue is “not a debate about the value of street art”. “This is a debate about whether it is acceptable to paint another person’s private property without their knowledge or permission,” she says. The council also works with local artists and budgets $1.7 million annually for public artworks and murals. Just this month, it approved walls to be painted for Brisbane’s first street art festival.

But Hinchliffe argues the council stance is still too rigid. “Lister doesn’t paint on homes or well-maintained commercial buildings unless he gets permission. For buildings where owners have demonstrated they don’t care, I see no problem in having real artwork such as Lister’s,” he says. “I think there ought to be a way where artists of Lister’s calibre can register with the council. They could be given a certain flexibility in relation to painting on walls of commercial buildings which are demonstrably rundown.

“Street artists like Lister and modern sophisticated cities should be working together.”

Embracing graffiti has not shielded Valparaiso from what authorities consider vandalism.

Most city residents find tagging, which is still widespread, harder to love than the bright murals. Ramirez says the move to embrace “artists” has also caused resentment among those who don’t have the skills or inclination to draw or paint what is popular. “You have graffiti writers saying, ‘I’m going to do a block letter and the dirtier the better, because I’m not an artist and art belongs in a gallery and graffiti is for the street’,” he says.

While not without flaws, the city’s pride in its policy is seen in a new book it has produced, praising street art as the “new face of Valparaiso”. “The impact of urban art on city-dwellers’ life is real,” it concludes. “It has the power to positively change the perception people have about their environment by removing the grey of the city walls.”

For Lister, it’s hard to promise his talents will never mark the streets of his hometown again, whether invited or not. “It’s a kind of sketchy playing field at the moment for me in Brisbane, that’s for sure,” he says. “I don’t need to feel like I’m looking over my shoulder to make good work, and it’s not the thrill of the chase or the adrenalin of doing something wrong that I’ve ever been after; it certainly doesn’t enhance my productivity.

“I find myself subconsciously scratching into tables … can I say I’ll never do it again? I don’t know. Can you say you’ll never break a glass again?”

council for street art promotion and said: “There is something wrong with the law if what I do is deemed graffiti and I’m guilty of damaging something I intended to make beautiful … It’s a sad day for the freedom of visual expression and creativity in Brisbane.” Lister says he was treated “like a criminal”. Queensland Police and Brisbane City Council say he committed a crime.

Valparaiso, a city of 275,000 in the South American nation of Chile, has always been

colourful. Legend has it local sailors would scavenge bright paint to decorate their houses in blues, greens and pinks so they could look up and spot theirs among the city’s 42 towering hills that tumble down to the Pacific Ocean.

A series of disasters, both natural (earthquakes) and man-made (new shipping routes offered by the Panama Canal), hurt “Valpo” and many had abandoned it by the second half of the 20th century. But the city is enjoying a cultural renaissance, transforming it from a seedy, weary place into a tourism hotspot and Chile’s cultural capital. Graffiti is at the heart of the revolution. “We’re trying to create this image for the world that Valpo is a graffiti-friendly city,” says Al Ramirez, the founder of Valpo Street Art Tours and a graffiti writer. “And people say, ‘But graffiti is a crime’, and I say ‘Yeah, but we are friends of that crime’.”

Graffiti was a form of protest against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in 1970s Valpo but Ramirez says when he first arrived in 2006, the only markings on the city’s buildings were “tags”, stylised scrawls that are a painter’s signature. By 2010, though, painting was “booming” with local street artists luring others to the city to paint over tags in brightly coloured letters, known as “pieces” (short for masterpiece), and murals – complex, time-consuming works.

“Valpo is such a paintable city,” Ramirez says. “You can paint anywhere and it just goes with the colours of the city.” Ramirez, who estimates Valpo has up to 300 “active painters”, says they provide a sort of civil service, helping decorate buildings in need of a revamp. “If there’s a neighbourhood that’s looking kind of ugly, we’ll clean it up and paint it and make it nice,” he says. The works that have made Valpo a haven for street art are everywhere. Some are brash and bold and others sneak up on you, revealing themselves on rooftops as you rise up a hill in one of the city’s creaking, 130-year-old ascensores (funicular railways). Even the garbage trucks are painted.

Jacobo Ahumada, cultural director of the Valparaiso municipality, explains how a quintessentially anti-establishment act was ultimately embraced. “We ran a street art contest for three years from 2008, and the aim was to try

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to convince the people of Valparaiso that graffiti was an art, and to teach them the difference between the graffiti and the tags or vandalism,” Ahumada says through an interpreter. “When the painters started to do big murals on old buildings that were almost a wreck, and the people started to see art in these buildings, the change started. It wasn’t just tags, it was art. And when the graffiti started turning into beauty, it’s easier for everyone to accept. There are tourists who come to Valparaiso just for the graffiti, so the people now realise it has a certain value. The graffiti are now part of the identity of the city.”

Last year the municipality issued a simple decree allowing two ways to paint legally. For city property, the painter must obtain municipal permission, and for private it’s up to the owner. There is no “censorship” of what is painted on private walls, even if they are publicly visible, including political statements.

Queensland law defines graffiti as “spraying, writing, drawing, marking, scratching,

etching or applying paint to a person’s property without their consent”. In 2008, the Bligh government amended legislation to allow removal of graffiti from private property without owners’ consent in certain circumstances. In 2013, the Newman government increased the maximum penalty for wilful damage by graffiti to

seven years’ jail. Possessing a spray can which “is being used for graffiti” or “is suspected of having been used for graffiti” carries a maximum penalty of a $2277 fine or one year in prison.

In 2014, the Newman government reported that the cost of preventing or removing graffiti and enforcing anti-graffiti laws cost taxpayers $200 million annually. And Brisbane City Council argues its own investment of about $3.1 million a year on graffiti clean-up and prevention is working. Since the “Taskforce Against Graffiti” (TAG) was launched in 2008, there has been a 60 per cent decrease in the number of graffiti “tags” identified and removed, Councillor Krista Adams, chairman of the Brisbane Lifestyle Committee, tells Qweekend in a statement. In 2014-15 there were 57,256 tags, compared to 139,891 in 2009-10.

As Brisbane has cracked down on graffiti, the global emergence of street art has muddied the waters. Melbourne, for example, has won international acclaim for, and drawn tourists to, its designated graffiti laneways. “We also work with the anti-graffiti crew and they pay us to create murals in areas that are heavily tagged,” says Adrian Doyle, a street artist who runs Melbourne urban art centre Blender Studios. “It saves them money, because the cost of putting up a mural is cheaper than the cost of constantly removing tags.”

Cr Adams says Brisbane Council supports artists and public art across the city, but draws a line when it comes to illegal graffiti. “Council commissions murals across the city to be completed by local artists and young people as part of its graffiti management strategy, as well as installing public art,” she says. “We also encourage private property owners to commission murals and public artworks on their property to enhance spaces across the city. But there’s a clear difference between artwork that has been commissioned and graffiti sprayed onto other people’s property without their permission.”

What compels me to do uncommissioned artwork? How do I explain that?” Lister asks.

“It’s not a case of why I decide it should be there; it’s screaming out to be there. I’m just communicating with the environment in which I live, which should be the case for all public people.”

Lister’s public painting career in Brisbane began in 2000, and it was the council that gave him his start. Then deputy mayor David Hinchliffe, himself an artist, established Artforce, a project for young artists who volunteered to create street art on traffic signal boxes that had previously been tagged. “I believed if we covered them with street art they were less likely to be tagged and they would turn Brisbane into a drive-through gallery,” Hinchliffe says. “Anthony

GUERILLA GRAFFITI … ART ON THE RUN IN VALPARAISO AND (OPPOSITE) IN MILTON, INNER BRISBANE, BY “ADVENTURE PAINTER” ANTHONY LISTER (INSET); (OPENING PAGES) EL JUSTICIERO, A VALPARAISO MURAL.

“There is something wrong with the law if what I do is deemed graffiti … it’s a sad day for the freedom of

visual expression and creativity in Brisbane.” A N T H O N Y L I S T E R

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