Bob Peck used to think abstract art was “the ultimate scam.”
Abstraction was what people did if they couldn’t make real art. Maybe it was a joke played on viewers.
Then one day he was preparing a canvas for some of his own work, which had grown out of his years tagging abandoned buildings with graffiti. He threw some colors down as a ground, but before got around to the graffiti, something weird happened: He liked what he saw. So he did a few more. 
Friends came over and saw the canvases. They asked Peck what he planned for them.
“I said, ‘I don’t know. I think they’re done,’ “ Peck says. “They’re like, ‘NO, come on, dude, don’t go that route.’ ”
But the dude did. Today the 33-year-old artist, new to Red Dot Project, is finding success where the street meets the gallery. He’s getting commissions, and has done work for Scion, the car company, and Red Bull, to name a few.
His paintings can fill canvases corner to corner with color and line, or they can exhibit a haiku-like restraint. The connection to graffiti is unmistakable when you know Peck’s background, but without the text the viewer is forced to focus on color, shape, the sense of dimension or its lack.
Peck grew up in Lakewood and around Cleveland, and as a kid in the 1980s found that graffiti left him wide-eyed and wondering. He remembers noticing that he’d walk by a tagged building and feel that the work was really big: it took a long time to move from one end to another.
At first, he was young enough that he didn’t realize this wasn’t something done merely in Cleveland. Eventually he started hanging around some of the artists who work working it, got a mentor and learned the ropes.
As he grew from teen tagger to grownup artist, Peck never lost his affection for graffiti. He complains, though, that the Internet has killed regional styles by exposing young artists to a handful of popular styles they then emulate.
Much remains misunderstood about graffiti art, he says.
“I think the funniest thing is (that others) think we’re all a bunch of black and Hispanic guys in gangs,” he says. “That’s the biggest misconception. They have this borderline racist stereotype.”
All kinds of people make graffiti, he says, though it remains more popular among men than women. Younger girls tend to be into street art, he says – making stencils and hanging posters.
And of course, there remains a widely held perception of graffiti artists as vandals. Yet the good ones, Peck says, obey a kind of code of ethics.
“Most of us don’t touch a church, a house, someone’s car, schools. We’re mainly looking for abandoned buildings, some rooftop,” he says. “It’s never like this person’s front porch is going to be a target.”
That doesn’t stop others from taking offense. Peck once spent hours on painting the wall of a business that had invited him to work it.
“Some people loved it, and others came by and said, ‘I can’t believe they’re letting you do that.’ ”
The next day he returned and found someone had tossed a gallon of paint over his work, ruining it.
“At that point I just primed over it,” he said. No sense reworking it when it might again be vandalized.
So the misperceptions continue.
As for his own perceptions – say, about abstract art – they have changed. He maintains that some abstraction still strikes him as not well done. He gets suspicious when artists try to sell their work with long explanations about what it all means.
But through making it himself, he has developed an eye for what’s good. He looks for texture and composition.
Most of all, he says, he looks for beauty.
