E-Mail This Article to a Friend Writing on the wall (continued)

Darkclouds IS just one person. Really.

In the course of the last year, Darkclouds has left pictorial footprints all over the city. They’re cartoony and textured, with fat black ink drips as falling rain. He’s screwed them beneath other signs, and alone on rusty, unused poles. He’s produced them on countless batches of free stickers, and even on a few old skateboard decks. They’ve been sighted everywhere — Central Square, the Esplanade, Kenmore Square, Mission Hill, Newbury Street, Storrow Drive.

They’re so prevalent that they’ve conjured up their own mythology. Since it seems impossible that one person could have mounted so many signs and stickers, some assumed a local cultural council or community organization was behind it; others guessed it was a collective of street artists. "I have also heard the rumors about it being a collective of people, but I’m not sure I believe that," e-mails Mike Bodge, a twentysomething blogger who posts photos of local street art. "Every single sign and sticker looks like it was drawn by the same person. [But] it’s entirely possible that one person does all of the painting and then delegates the signs and stickers to other people."

Word about the project has spread so far that London resident Tristan Manco, a British author and graphic designer who has documented street art all over the world in his books Stencil Graffiti and Street Logos (both Thames & Hudson), says he’s heard about it. Even Darkclouds himself hears people talking about his work. "It’s gotten to the point for me where if somebody’s talking about it at a bar, I don’t like to disclose [that they’re mine]," he admits. "Because I’ve had people ask me all these questions and sometimes I don’t feel like getting into it. I don’t want everybody to know it’s me. My friends all know and it just gets back. It’s a small city."

"It’s flattering," he says of the rumors that he’s a guerrilla-art army, "but it’s just one fuckin’ weird dude."

Darkclouds is not, however, Little Nick, a 24-year-old self-described "post-graffiti artist" whose cartoony, lucid characters have been popping up on Boston’s thoroughfares for three years. Yet some have mistaken the cloud series for Little Nick’s handiwork, even though their styles are dissimilar.

One of Little Nick’s recurring characters — a member of a playful, childlike ensemble he calls "Double Eye Patch" — does float on a puffy cloud. That’s Prince Nicoli, a ruler whose vaporous throne showers cylindrical raindrops that resemble beer cans. ("You be the judge as to what they are," Nick says.) There’s also Ellie the Elliephant, a baby pachyderm that looks like a walking envelope, and Estrellita ("little star"), a collective name for Nick’s squat drawings of adorable girls with long arms and wide sleeves. He draws the Double Eye Patch cast over and over and over — on makeup cases and tote bags, canvases and stickers.

Galleries have shown Little Nick’s work, including Lowell’s Evos Arts and UMass Boston, and he contributed to the traveling Russian-doll exhibit at Green Street Studios. But Little Nick’s illustrations also beautify urban fixtures: wooden spheres screwed through porous telephone-booth sides, blue-painted timber blocks attached to fences, boards bolted to iron posts. "I’m not trying to be an enemy of the city," Nick says over lunch at the Other Side Cosmic Café, a laid-back coffee bar and sandwich shop with spray-painted walls and tagged napkin holders. It’s no coincidence that Nick’s pieces are removable, or that they tend to grace objects that are otherwise eyesores: rusted iron containers, green newspaper boxes, hulking FedEx containers — fixtures, he thinks, "the city doesn’t like."

Sitting across from Misternever, a former graf writer three years his senior whose silhouette turns up on stickers and stencils around the city, Little Nick explains that he sees the streets much the way Shepard Fairey did — as a marketing tool. "I’m really into my ideas becoming iconography." Metropolitan areas are obvious galleries, public venues with boundless space and a limitless, inclusive audience. "Other artists I meet, I’m like, ‘You can’t get a show in a gallery? Hey, you should actually try the streets.’ "

Although Little Nick and Misternever write in an e-mail that they "do not condone, nor do they support the destruction of public and or private property," they’ve learned from graffiti how to promote themselves. "Graffiti tells you how to be an entrepreneur and how to get fame," says Little Nick. "It’s like an advertising degree."

"You’re advertising yourself across the city," adds Misternever. "It’s interesting; so many people spend their lives just kind of putting along, forever to be unknown. Why not be just like, ‘Hey, you know what? I’m here.’ Why not just tell everybody that you’re here?"

BOSTON ISN’T the kind of mecca for street art that San Francisco and Manhattan are, cities teeming with artists and heavily steeped in graffiti traditions. Boston’s student population, which dominates the age demographic most likely to work in the streets, is too transient to groom a culture of large-scale organized street work, and the city’s staunch opposition to unsanctioned art doesn’t help.

"I’m dead on posters," says Mike Galvin, the director of Boston’s Basic City Services, who explains that each one illegally displayed carries a $300 fine. "Posters, those to me are not what I want on the city streets. The only exclusion is if you were having a yard sale or a church sale or a bake sale for the Cub Scouts." What about a missing cat? "Missing cats?" Galvin muses. "I don’t know."

Indeed, Boston officials are humorless about defaced property. In 1998, Rhode Island School of Design student Ryan Krakowsky, a 19-year-old graf writer known as Lobe, and a classmate donned MBTA uniforms, orange vests, and construction helmets to paint the entire Arlington Street T station pink. The pair was caught and charged with willful and malicious destruction.

Galvin thinks taggers and graffiti writers "deserve jail time." Even people putting up posters? "Yeah, absolutely."

But Little Nick doesn’t understand what’s so unlawful about hanging up a picture in public space. "You’re not, like, doing anything wrong. You’re not selling drugs or stabbing somebody. You’re just putting up a drawing. Is it really worth dedicating taxpayers’ money to rip down pictures?"

Apparently so. "If you go by downtown and wherever there’s plywood blocking up construction, [someone] will come in the middle of the night and slap up a poster. And I don’t want that," says Galvin. Why not? Is the plywood more aesthetically pleasing than a poster? "Yeah, most of the time it is," Galvin insists. "The poster is only bringing down the neighborhood. And I don’t want to see it in our city. If you cared about the neighborhood, you wouldn’t do that. It’s unacceptable."

Even if it’s an artwork? "If it’s an artwork, then put it in the gallery," Galvin says. "It may be an artwork to you, but it’s not to me."

Caleb Neelon was putting up signs years ago. A 27-year-old Harvard grad and former graf writer who called himself Sonik, the Cambridge-based artist realized way back in 1996 that most Boston-area signposts had extra holes beneath each traffic sign. "This was just real estate for the taking," Neelon writes on his Web site. So over the next seven years — while limning murals in Nepal and India and showing work at Lowell’s Revolving Museum — he attached countless plywood squares along bike paths, main streets, and wooded roads under the rubric "Signs of Life." Most of the boards featured figures painted in acrylics against white backgrounds: high-heeled shoes, plumed birds, smiling dinosaurs, marching hamburgers. Some of the signs were site-specific: in 2003, on the day before the Boston Marathon, Neelon put up a placard, pointing to the end of Newbury Street, that read WOMEN I CAN’T AFFORD/AND STUFF I DON’T NEED.

While Neelon’s renderings aren’t typically political, street art is often a means of protest. During the war in Iraq, an onslaught of dissenting opinions appeared on objects around Boston, from stickers reading ONE TERM PRESIDENT to BUSH IS BANANAS stenciled on the pavement. (See "American Graffiti," News and Features, April 11, 2003.) Even Magmo the Destroyer, a superhero created by local artist Ryan Maguire who shows up on stickers, is an activist who’s come to conquer apathy, big business, and materialism.