Despite her splattered jeans and being surrounded by spray paint cans, brushes and a myriad of colors to dip them in, Jules Muck, 40, is not comfortable with the label "artist." She shifts in her seat when asked, "So, what do you do?"
"I'm like a painter, I guess," Muck says. "I paint a lot."
This was not the career path she projected for herself. "I didn't think, 'Oh I'm going to be an artist.' I was like, 'Oh God. I'm going to do this other thing.'"
"This other thing" she planned on doing translated to a lot of different jobs including dabbling as a mechanic, stints in law and medical school, teaching Sunday school at a Methodist church (she's not Methodist), and picking up work as a phone psychic and delivery driver. Art, it seems, called to Muck anyway.
She's come a long way for someone who began by simply scrawling "Muck" everywhere from police stations and football stadiums to underneath bridges and on the sides of derelict buildings. The same name that was once scrubbed off by graffiti removal crews now earns her thousands of dollars as a signature on larger works.
Over the years Muck has been verbally and physically attacked, arrested and jailed over her sometimes controversial art. In 2001, shortly after 9/11, she was walking through New York City's Little Italy neighborhood when someone took issue with a painting she was carrying, and started chasing her down the street. It was a larger-than-life portrait of Osama bin Laden with a saint-like expression.
When Homeland Security appeared at Muck's doorstep after the incident, she showed them other works related to the terrorist attack. The point was made—these thought-provoking depictions were part of her grieving process for the city that she lived in at the time.
These days Muck doesn't feel the same anger as in her earlier years, nor the need to express it quite as loudly to the public through her work. She says there's no point in inviting additional obstacles to her life now, and if people don't like her art, it's their problem, not hers.
"The thing that drags me down is definitely my obsessive insecurity in my own mind," she says. "That is what I have to fight against every day. I have to let go of that every day."
Growing up, she felt tossed around from country to country and school to school by her parents, who did not like staying in one place. She mostly alternated between Greece, the United Kingdom and New York. Muck says as a child her parents would sometimes send her ahead to new locations to test them out, like a canary in a coal mine checking for carbon monoxide. Several times, they didn't follow, leaving Muck to figure out the new, strange environment until the next move.
"I'm super grateful at this point, at the time I was like "What the fuck?" And you know, it was difficult as an adolescent, because I didn't feel like I knew enough people here, you feel insecure, but now I'm super grateful that I got those experiences," she said.
Relocating so much was a sharp double-edged sword. Sure, she's been exposed to multiple languages, is familiar with various cultures, and has never felt afraid to travel. But no matter where she went as a kid, she always felt like an outsider—except in California.
"I really like the idea of being rooted, love the fact that I found California, where I feel really at home, and I feel like I recharge here from everywhere else," she says.
Her start in California was not easy, but Muck said she was adopted by the city. That relationship became her catharsis. She found a way to express her emotions outside of herself.
"You know, my paintings are more like a regurgitation," she says. "I think it's a form of crying, it's a form of a sneeze, it's a form of puking. I'm already doing it, I'm painting, it's coming out."
Behind her lays a half-finished piece: a Dodger-blue sky, and what appears to be the beginning of tall, skinny palm trees, like those that iconically line many streets in Los Angeles. The final product is a secret only she knows.
"I never thought [my art] was something concrete to help people. And that's what my feeling of a human being in the world is to do. We're supposed to help each other," Muck says. "So, it is cool that people tell me that it helps—even though I'm not freaking fixing a brain tumor and I'm not, you know, building a house—that I'm able to do something to contribute to society."
Muck finishes that half-painted work a couple days later. The palm trees burn fiery blood-orange behind a big-haired, platinum blonde woman wearing 3D glasses. She's holding a soda in one hand and a box of skull-shaped popcorn in the other. This risque Marilyn Monroe-lookalike is staring out at the viewer, open-mouthed at the scene presumably around her. Muck captions the Instagram post of the work "#hollywoodisburning."
Over the years, Muck has grown a thick skin. She appreciates that her work affects its audience differently. Whether people like it or not, she doesn't mind. As for her plans for the future, Muck isn't worried about that either.
"LA is made it so, has made me have no boundaries, I'm just like, 'Whatever, I can do whatever I want, and I don't fucking care.'"