Like many young adults, Ben Westergreen regularly updates his wall status. But unlike most people, he does it with spray paint.

Westergreen, 24, scrawls words in public spaces, tags pseudonyms on city walls and plasters pre-made stickers around town. The city is his canvas and he paints the town with an aerosol rainbow-mist at least weekly.

According to authorities, he’s the portrait of a vandal who doesn’t contribute to society, but detracts from it.

He rolls out a carpet-sized painting tucked neatly under one of two easels in his downtown studio apartment.

“Graffiti to me is anything you do outside illegally. This to me is just some sort of hybrid,” he says as he lays it down on his clean hardwood floor. It’s a cat magnet to his plump black and white tabby who casually takes a seat in the middle of the painting

There’s a blue three-dimensional orb-like design with pink veins running through. It’s got graffiti-style fills, outlines and force fields – the highlighting colour that makes graffiti “pop.” There are no words, only word-inspired shapes.

“Graffiti is anything outdoor, traditionally word-based,” he says. “This is the same form, but there’s no danger. It’s not a wall. It’s not vandalism. It’s kind of in a limbo space.”

It’s not the sort of graffiti Const. Valerie Spicer is worried about. It’s what Westergreen does outside that concerns her.

Spicer is a member of the Vancouver police department, a former graffiti investigator and speaker at this week’s anti-graffiti symposium at Delta Ocean Pointe resort.

She says graffiti is a covert, anti-social crime that her department takes seriously.

“It is an at-risk youth behaviour, no different than fire setting,” she says. “It’s basically … on the same axis as sex-offending and violence.”

Although she hesitates to call graffiti a “gateway” activity, she says it’s part of a group of anti-social behaviour that can lead to other criminal activity.

To Westergreen, graffiti is inherently social – a way to interact with the world around him, not hide from it.

“How are you going to work artistically in the open public market?” he asks. “You don’t just want to sit at home drawing. Everyone needs that social reaction to what they do.”

Illegality is part of the thrill, he says, but he abides by a strict code. He doesn’t paint private property like houses, cars or churches. Dumpsters and electric boxes are fair game because he figures no one will get offended if he decorates them.

When Westergreen moved here from Yellowknife, N.W.T. for school more than five years ago, it’s how he engaged with the city around him.

“You live in this world of icons, brands and you’re like, ‘how do I discuss with this? What’s my dialogue?’ So you make up your own brand. You make up your own icons,” he says.

But local authorities don’t see graffiti as social dialogue.

In 2004, Spicer created a database of 500 graffiti-writers from the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island for her master’s thesis.

She says many of them became sex-offenders or drug traffickers.

“It’s a fairly high percentage that end up doing that,” she says.

Westergreen started writing on walls at 13 to deal with his parents’ marriage separation. He was arrested at 16, and spent 160 hours cleaning up other people’s graffiti.

Despite this, graffiti has proven positive for the young artist. After his community service, he got numerous job offers from shopkeepers for his hard work.

Since then, Westergreen’s style has evolved into what he calls post-graffiti or graphic art.

Wall-space in his tidy studio apartment is filled with panels of paintings defying gravity and space. There are cityscapes, a fusion of colours bleed into each other and droplets of paint fall like tears from the edges.

But there are no words. Letters are a crutch, he says, it’s too easy to fall in love with the structure of the alphabet.

So his University of Victoria professors pushed him to expand his graffiti-style.

Westergreen points out his freshly mounted degree in visual arts, which he received with distinction.

While local police departments say graffiti is linked to other illegal activities, Westergreen says it’s proven positive for him. Instead of recoiling from society, it made him an active participant.

“It’s given me a goal in life. “(Graffiti is) where I got my skill set to go to art school. If I didn’t, I’d probably be back home, working in a mine, drinking every night. I wouldn’t be happy,” he says.

He recently took part in the Moss Street Paint-in, and has an upcoming art show Oct. 22 at the Boucherat Art Gallery in Fan Tan Alley. He’s also working towards going to grad school.

Still, Westergreen says graffiti is where it’s at.

“Art galleries have a certain snobbery to them. Most people don’t go to art galleries,” he says. “Everyone walks down the street.”

lweighton@vicnews.com