His figure, hidden in a dark hoodie and baggy jeans, can easily be seen against the neon yellow wall in front of him.
Never mind: spray can in hand, he moves quickly, watching for the familiar lights. A stream of blue chases his every stroke. Up. Down. Then up again. Until five bulging letters appear:
iROCK.
Moments later, 30-year-old Michael Alsobrook is across the street and onto his next piece. This time, it was the side of the 405 Freeway.
“We’ll bless it real quick,” said Alsobrook, like a self-assured graffiti god.
In fact, in the colorful heavens of Venice’s streets, where ribbons of paint encircle abandoned buildings and trash cans alike, Alsobrook exists as just that. A god. A celebrity. An inspiration, to many.
The iROCK.
“Shortly after I started doing graffiti, I was in middle school, and the September 11th attacks happened. During homeroom, my teacher made us watch BBC News.
“I just remember, it’s like this British guy, and when he would talk about the events in Iraq, he’d be like, the events in I-rock,” said Alsobook in his best British accent. “I was like, iROCK…That shit’s tight.”
But his name and renown come with far less certainty than it sounds.
Weeks after being bailed out of custody, a black eye marking one side of his face, Alsobrook has made a run of draping his graffiti across the streets of L.A.. Over the last two decades, he has grown from beginner to “burner,” from observer to leader, all while balancing on a thin border between artist and vandalist.
“It’s a whole other world,” Alsobrook said. “Growing up… I was a little ass kid painting at the Venice walls right there at the beach, and learning from people who are real experts in the craft.”
Now, whether he admits it or not, Alsobrook is the expert, the walls his craft.
Once a month, he and his crew – ‘The Folks,’ they call themselves – make the 40-minute drive to Whittier, southeast of Downtown L.A., where their go-to paint store, RD Artist Supplies, offers “the good stuff.” The shop is not only known for its stockpile of colors, but for its added discount on large orders.
The Folks will need it.
“Put it this way,” Alsobrook said. “The trunk is always stocked with spray paint, and everything we need is always in the car,” a black Toyota Corolla. “Sometimes it’ll be spontaneous and we’ll just do something illegal right then and there…but for the stuff that takes time, it’s all well planned and a lot of strategy.”
In Southern California’s teeming graffiti scene, days on the job are hardly the same for those like iROCK.
“There’s so many levels to graffiti,” Alsobrook said. “A lot of stuff you see on the streets, even if it’s really colorful sometimes and you could tell it’s just straight-up graffiti, that’s usually just off the top of the dome, like just laying it down on the wall.”
Garage doors become name tags lit in purple and pink; a dumpster a showpiece in a matter of minutes.
“Whatever you do in the street speaks for you,” said Victor “Yermo” Mondragon, one of The Folks. “That’s my gift in a sense of, like, life…We give back to the world by doing beautiful art.”
At times, there’s order to the artistry. In what he calls “commission walls,” Alsobrook looks to the tags of other L.A. graffiti artists as a business opportunity. Scribbled storefronts littering the city serve as the perfect breeding ground for passion and profit.
“That’s kind of our approach, to go to these businesses and we see their store’s tagged, and if it’s a nice wall, we’ll go inside and say, ‘Hey, if you want this to stop getting tagged on, you let us do our stuff this one time and it’ll be great art right here,’” Alsobrook said. “‘You won’t have to keep painting over your walls, so it saves you money in the end.’”
In Alsobrook’s case, the owner’s on board “nine times out of 10,” according to the artist himself.
“iROCK he’s just one of the local kids,” said Ernest Miranda, owner of Venice Glassworks on Pacific Avenue, where Alsobrook’s letters huddle passersby. “I watched him grow up.”
For most jobs, the wall is photographed, the design sketched and the price set. Then it’s all can.
“Even if it’s sketched out, like bringing that to the wall, the beginning stages, if you were to watch it on the sideline, it’s always like, ‘Damn, I don’t know where he’s going with this,’” Alsobrook said. “But in the end, because there’s just so many layers and layers of paint, everyone’s always like, ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t see that coming.’”
Alsobrook’s been learning those layers since he was nine. A “desert kid” at the time, he spent his weekends riding BMX dirt bikes through his hometown of Palmdale, in the far reaches of north L.A. County, always with markers stuffed in his pockets.
“One time he was riding his bike on the sidewalk, and he gets pulled over… [then] arrested because he has markers on him,” said Eileen Alsobrook, Alsobrook’s mother. “I remember having to go to court and bringing his art books, and [telling them], ‘He’s an artist so he’s going to carry markers around with him.’”
“I’ve always drawn. I think it’s something I’ve just always done,” Alsobrook said. “I remember being a little kid, and my dad always telling people, ‘He’s going to be an artist, just watch.’”
At the same time that Alsobrook was collecting caricature drawing books over birthdays and Christmases, his parents separated. Alsobrook and his mother moved to L.A. where he enrolled in Marina Del Rey Middle School. It was there he’d get his first glimpse into the world of graffiti.
“I remember sitting next to some kid, and he’s like tagging on paper, and I was like, ‘Oh, like, you’re in a gang?’” said Alsobrook. “He just laughs and he’s like, ‘No, I’m a tagger.’ I was like, ‘Oh, shit,’ I kind of knew what he’s talking about. I kind of know what’s up with graffiti.”
The kid asked, so Alsobrook picked up a marker and drew his name.
“I remember him showing other kids, like, ‘Look, look what he just did.’ And they were … impressed,” said Alsobrook. “It felt good to already be kinda better than other kids that were doing it.”
“When we moved here to L.A., because we were in Palmdale, [the teachers used to tell me] all the kids look up to him, all the kids like him, he’s funny and I just wish he would mentor them,” said Alsobrook’s mother, Eileen.
It wasn’t long before Alsobrook was leading a crew of his own, exploring the streets of Venice, searching for scratch paper.
“We’d just be like, ‘Oh, let’s go try this,’” said Alsobrook. “Now I walk up with any aspect of it comfortably and just do my thing, but at those times, even just learning how to use a spray can… all that is just practice for years.”
When it comes to graffiti, the practice is there to stay.
“Any famous artist always started with the streets,” Mondragon said. “It was literally all about the work you put in in the street.”
“It was out there, it’s still out there, in the streets, because we didn’t really care,” Alsobrook said. “We still wanted people to see.”
When Alsobrook entered high school, the distinction between artist and tagger became more and more difficult to navigate.
Tagging, a practice in graffiti involving the repeated use of a symbol to mark a territory, has taken on a deeper meaning throughout much of L.A.. The tags themselves, often left in strategic locations to attract the highest attention, are largely associated with gangs and violence that mark the city.
“They’ll do two-color silver and black on someone’s storefront, which I can’t say I’ve never done, but that’s the vandalism aspect of it,” Alsobrook said. “I definitely can understand why people would hate on it, because like a lot of stuff in the streets, you’re seeing people taking five seconds to catch a tag real quick. It’s definitely a lot different than seeing something that took five hours.”
“At first, I just thought he was going around and tagging things, which is not legal,” said Eileen. “And…he did do that.”
Alsobrook received his first conviction for graffiti when he was 17, the same year California declared vandalism a crime.
He was given a thousand hours of community service, which took a year to complete. Meanwhile, he transferred from Venice High School to Venice Skills Center, where he could learn “at his own pace.”
“I wasn’t 17 trying to get my first job. I was 17 and cleaning up the city,” Alsobrook said.
But iROCK was different. A kid, a painter, not a vandal.
Despite her concerns, Eileen knew the price her son would pay on occasion would not wash over the art itself.
“Once he was doing it on paper and showing me things, you can just see how talented he was,” she said.
Besides, Alsobrook knew better.
“Graffiti writers, we have a different mentality,” Alsobrook said. “What we put on the wall is art to us. It’s not territorial stuff.”
In 2008, Alsobrook moved to San Francisco to attend the Academy of Art University. He would study computer arts and media, the school’s newest major at the time.
“Instead of graphic design, which is a lot more structured and focused just on graphic design, it kind of taught me video and how to make a website,” Alsobrook said. “Kind of everything you need for what was up-and-coming in the creative world on a computer.”
Two years earlier, Alsobrook and his friends started Those Folks, a local community and clothing company inspired by the quintessential “Venice lifestyle”: skateboarding, music and, of course, graffiti.
College would be a chance for Alsobrook to explore new forms and methods to art-making, so that someday he could reach Those Folks far beyond the streets he grew up in.
“That was my goal,” he said. “I just wanted to pursue that.”
Until the accident.
He had been in San Francisco for over a year, and had transferred to a smaller, less-expensive community college.
One night, walking home alone from a party, Alsobrook was approached by a group of men dressed in red. They told him to empty his pockets.
Alsobrook punched one of the men and ran down the street, into a dead end.
“When I had to face them, one of them threw a full 40-ounce bottle, like a big bottle, and something told me to turn around because they were running around the parked cars trying to surround me,” Alsobrook said. “I was just trying to run away, but something stopped me in my tracks.”
The bottle hit and shattered onto Alsobrook’s face, sending shards of glass into his eyes and cutting open his left eyelid.
“Instantly, I was blind,” Alsobrook said.
Alsobrook could not see correctly for a year. He dropped out of school and moved home, where doctors removed glass from his eyes for three weeks.
“I couldn’t see the sun. I couldn’t go outside, really. Even at night, inside, with one light on I couldn’t even, I had to have sunglasses on,” Alsobrook said. “I swear, I was crying for at least eight months straight.”
Alsobrook slipped into depression.
“It was a major thing,” Eileen said. “It put a big damper on his whole life at the time.”
“Just out of nowhere, not being able to do anything, not being able to paint, go to parties or anything, and having to stay home, plus staying inside and [a] lack of Vitamin D,” Alsobrook said.
“Definitely had me on some depressed shit.”
When he healed enough to open his eyes, it didn’t matter. He could hardly recognize the world around him.
Alsobrook moved in with a friend. He turned to drugs and stayed away from his family.
“It was a terrible time for me, that’s for sure, and I’m sure it was a worse time for him,” Eileen said. “No matter what I tried to do, nothing would help.”
While living in San Francisco, Alsobrook had gone to jail over seven times for vandalism.
“I’d just stay there for a week, and then they let me out. Kind of, like, case dropped,” said Alsobrook.
Yet his run-ins with the law resulted in a record that made it more than difficult to find a job.
“It got bad, you know,” said Eileen. “At first, it was just partying a little bit, this and that, and then it got bad and he was actually living on the streets a little bit.”
When Alsobrook’s girlfriend at the time broke up with him, things got worse.
“I think that devastated him,” Eileen said, adding a moment later, “He did have just a downhill spiral… until about a year ago, he finally got back up.”
“I be going through it on a regular basis,” Alsobrook said. “I just be taking blows, like shit…getting hit with life.”
In March 2020, one of Alsobrook’s closest friends, Daniel Brown, died in the streets of L.A.. He is one of several friends Alsobrook has lost over the years.
Alsobrook gathered his and Daniel’s friends from across the city to paint a tribute. Within hours, nearly 100 people had shown up.
“Yesterday we pulled up on that wall to the building where my friend died at and, technically, that’s graffiti, but we painted a straight portrait of the space and did his name,” Alsobrook said. “That in the Venice community means everything to so many people right now, and it’s illegal graffiti.”
Alsobrook said he is “all about his family of friends.” The same kids he has been painting with since middle school.
“It’s ‘in us we trust,’” Alsobrook said. “That’s kind of definitely something we live by, me and my friend circle and my support group. We definitely got each other’s backs through everything.”
“It’s just like family in other words. Folks just means family,” said Victor Mondragon.
Despite the legal fragilities of the walls themselves, Alsobrook leans on them, too. More than anything.
“Today, I wanted to go, I woke up like, ‘Man, I want to go paint. I want to go light up a wall,’” he said. “It just makes me feel good. It makes me happy.”
“I think art has definitely saved him,” said Eileen. “He’s gone through a lot, but I think that the art does save him, because if he didn’t have that, I don’t know where he’d be. He would be a troubled person, I’m pretty sure.”
Alsobrook agrees.
“That’s definitely one of the things at this point in my life, what keeps me going and continuing to care about it so much. At this point, it’s my whole identity,” he said. “I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t do art.”
“I would definitely probably be lost.”
He added, a small grin softening his face:
“I met some kid recently, and he’s like, ‘Yo, you’re iROCK? Literally, you’re the reason I do graffiti.’”