Street artists mourn, celebrate one of their own
You may still see remnants of a "SOLVE" sticker, stencil or spray-painted scrawl here and there around the east side -- on the sides of buildings, on telephone poles or on street signs.
Those memorial tributes came from members of RGB, an underground street art collective that Madison native Brendan Scanlon, a.k.a. SOLVE, helped found in Chicago a couple years ago.
After the 24-year-old Scanlon was stabbed to death in Chicago late on a Saturday night in mid-June, his fellow artists galvanized to memorialize him with public art as ephemeral as the man it honors. Police have arrested and charged Kirk Tobolski, also 24, in the killing.
On June 21, many of SOLVE's collaborators in Chicago came up to Madison for the funeral. Afterwards, hundreds of people packed the Wil-Mar Center near the Scanlon family home for a "typical Irish wake with lots of food and beer," said his father, Bill.
As much as it could be, the wake was a celebratory occasion, he said. And out of all the pieces of memorial artwork created for SOLVE, one silkscreened poster by artist Swiv seemed to capture the bittersweet moment best. It read, "Hope heaven has a lot of blank walls."
Long hidden behind his pseudonym, SOLVE's achievements and high regard in the street art scene are now attached publicly to his real name.
"We didn't know what a big deal he was," said Caitlyn, 27.
Sitting around the living room of their near-east side home recently, the Scanlons didn't choke up or get angry as they told stories about the son and brother they've lost. Instead, Caitlyn, her sister Megan, father Bill and mother Eileen McGlynn, laughed as they recalled memories about Brendan.
Brendan was the wild child of the family, so tall that people joked he'd cycled through puberty three or four times. He attended Shabazz City High School on the north side for a while, but then got expelled for "showing off dope paraphernalia" in math class, said Bill.
At East High School, he "was trying to straighten himself out," said Monica Urbanik, his drawing and painting teacher. "He definitely didn't play by the rules."
During class, he would quickly finish whatever she assigned and then get back to the art he really enjoyed: graffiti and stylized lettering. But his enthusiasm for a chalk mural project on State Street shortly after 9/11 with a small group of Urbanik's students foretold his budding interest in making public art.
In his troubled teenage years, those art classes were a turning point. Once he started making art, "he started to be a happy guy," Bill said.
After graduating from high school in 2002, he worked at Monty's Blue Plate Diner for a year before attending the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago and eventually getting a degree in visual communication.
"He was really concerned after college that he didn't want to work for 'the Man,'" said Caitlyn, rolling her eyes. So it surprised everyone when he got a real job late last year -- with health insurance, a business card and the title of "creative coordinator" at a company called Relay Worldwide. But he still held on to his anti-establishment core by going into work with bed head and thinking up creative marketing schemes that involved a "midget circus," she added, laughing.
But his attention to detail, his obsession with fonts and his intense creativity contributed to his success at the job, the Scanlons agreed. The work he put into projects deeply impressed them. One Christmas he apologized for being too poor to buy gifts, but made each family member a personalized mix CD accompanied by a large painting he created while listening to the CD.
Meanwhile, he was still active with the RGB Collective and getting known nationally for his art. He even got featured in the book, "Street Art and the War on Terror." In Chicago, he got together with other artists to do collaborative projects.
Saro, another street artist, remembered meeting SOLVE at an art show, long after seeing his work around Chicago.
"When I got there, there was a giant sitting on one of the child-sized wooden chairs, coloring in his stickers with colored pencils," he said. "I shook his hand and introduced myself, and he knew who I was right off the bat. He was very aware of other artists in Chicago, not like a lot of the people here, so caught up in their own work."
SOLVE's best known works were large, neon-colored bumper stickers with his moniker in stylized letters, said Saro. "Those stickers were like his 'Starry Night,' everyone knew him and his name because of them. Sometimes he'd put them on signs over certain words to make it read, 'Solve Lane Only' or stuff like that. His work was simple, yet intricate and very effective."
Memorial donations in Brendan Scanlon's name are being accepted at East High School in a fund that his family set up for the art department.
"We hope that through these funds, it will make a difference in some other young person's life," said McGlynn, Brendan's mother.
Submitted photo
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Madison native Brendan Scanlon, shown here in a photo from the Web site Deviant Art, was a street artist better known by the pseudonym "SOLVE."
