Spray paint on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

Painted entirely in spray paint, Howard Yard 2005, 2025 is a work the artist describes as Graffiti Realism a direct continuation of the medium’s original function and its highest technical expression, overlapping his ability to convey depth of emotion and human expression through mark-making.

In this picture, the viewer stands before the entry point to Chicago’s Howard Yard (c. 2005). It’s nighttime. In the distance, the yard glows alive, illuminated from within. The trains balance movement in opposite directions; the air hums with the rhythm of metal and voltage. This restricted subway depot once served as studio, classroom, and battleground for generations of writers. To access it, you were either part of the leading crews with a key or, as an independent artist, you scaled a wall topped with barbed wire, earning both scars and confrontation with the “rules” enforced, by force, by the OGs. Those exchanges would later form a defining chapter in the artist’s origin story.

This is not a romanticized view; it’s a reconstruction from lived memory. The image mirrors an artist who has faced resistance at every turn, and persisted nonetheless. It asks: At what point in the great myth do we see the artist? And what radical transformation is he reflecting back to us?

What Joe Ellis calls the artist’s “first studio” was a site of study, danger, and self-education.
Rendered in luminous gradients of orange and black, the painting translates the language of graffiti into atmospheric realism. The scene glows from within, like something remembered more than seen carrying the pulse of a space both forbidden and formative.

Beneath the painting lies the poem that anchors it:

Howard Yard Poem 
by SHOCK UC MSK

Back when I was a student
I left school and went to college
Seeking higher knowledge
At subway yards hard to get into like Harvard
But with higher charges.

Stayed on the train and went to Howard
To study under Modern Urban Legends
And Chicago’s Most Wanted.

Kill Your Masters
Was the only class that’s offered each semester
Miss the lecture, get electrocuted.

Quarter million restitution
Mega-mind superhumans
Watching the system through stolen binoculars
From a condominium parking lot.

People who paint the spot whether the cop is parked or not.
Who get caught, plead insanity,
And a million other unbelievable stories—
Peace to the Chicago Transit Authority.

The poem, and the painting it inspired, reveal a personal mythology of apprenticeship and autonomy.

The acronyms MUL, CMW, and KYM Modern Urban Legends, Chicago’s Most Wanted, and Kill Your Masters represent the crews that painted Chicago’s subway system during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Entry into the yards was an initiation. Information was currency. Years later, when the artist reconnected with those same figures, the tension had dissolved into mutual respect. 

“Sorry,” they told him, “the rules were the rules.”

Howard Yard 2005, 2025 stands as both elegy and evolution a moment where graffiti realism becomes formal painting, and the myth of the train yard becomes contemporary art history.