‘No one’s coming to save you.’ How graffiti, faith lifted him from addiction to fine art

Jared Haviland can recall the moment graffiti entered his life. It was June 1997 — the day he moved to Tacoma from Whidbey Island where his father had been a sailor.

Haviland was a 13-year-old boy, stopped at a red light across from an abandoned building.

“I was in the back of the (family) van, listening to headphones or whatever, and I looked out the window and I noticed these kids with skateboards,” he recalled. “Then one kid just started tagging a window. I was like, ‘What in the world is that?’”

Since then, graffiti has been a constant in his life, from the rock-bottom lows of drug addiction to his eventual salvation. This month, he has a show in a high-end Silicon Valley art gallery.

“It started out very simply — painting graffiti in the alleys around town,” the now 39-year-old said recently in his paint-stained garage turned North End Tacoma studio. “People would come up and say, ‘I wish I could take it right off the wall.’”

They didn’t mean power washing, he explained, the passers-by viewed Haviland’s work as art.

In 2014, Haviland transitioned to contemporary art, though he didn’t leave graffiti entirely in the rear-view mirror. He now paints canvases in a style of his own creation — one that combines graffiti and typography with abstract art. He coined his own term for it: typographic abstraction.

From Marine to addict

Haviland has deep roots in Tacoma. His grandparents moved to the city in the 1950s and opened a carpet store in the Nalley Valley.

He graduated from Stadium High School in 2002 and entered the Marine Corps the day he turned 18.

“I went and bought a pack of cigarettes and then I went into the recruiting office,” he said. “It was my life’s dream to go to the Marine Corps, being a soldier.”

That dream soon became a nightmare. The young Marine caught a case of pneumonia that developed into empyema, a disease that builds up fluid around the lungs. His condition went undiagnosed for weeks until he was rushed to an emergency room.

“I woke up in the ICU four or five days later,” he said.

Doctors told Haviland he would be disabled for life. His military career was over in less than a year.

Haviland was medically discharged and returned home just as his parents were divorcing. He found himself at what he calls “ground zero.”

“I was super naive and just didn’t understand trauma,” he said. “I didn’t understand my place in the world.”

He also didn’t understand the consequences of the actions that friends around him were making.

“I had disability money, a lot of free time on my hands, bad influences around ... very quickly, I was a drug addict,” he said.

An awakening

Haviland attended welding school, started a career and got married, but he was still an addict. At various times, he would abuse uppers, pain killers, alcohol and cannabis.

One day in 2013, he found himself driving around Tacoma, high and drunk. He made his way to a recovery center but was turned down for lack of insurance.

Haviland’s truth was laid before him.

“Dude, no one’s coming to save you. There’s nothing you can do. And you just have to surrender yourself. This is all your fault. You chose to continue to do drugs,” he told himself.

The admission was empowering, he said.

“If I did all this, I can do something about this,” he recalled. “And I kind of just woke up in that moment. That was the shifting point. And life began to change very rapidly from that point forward.”

Haviland developed what he calls a relationship with God and later went through an intensive form of therapy, called Lifespan Integration.

“I was released of 17 years of horrific internal suffering. I don’t talk about it too deeply, because I can’t get through it without doing this,” he says through tears.

Messages

There’s spiritual messaging on Haviland’s work, but it isn’t overt, requiring the viewer to contemplate the meaning. “Adduco,” “Protect,” “Praise,” “Wisdom” and other words swirl on fields of color.

“I‘m sharing my perspective, through the faith lens, and through the trials and experiences of the life I’ve had,” he said.

Those whose only experience with graffiti is from freeway underpasses might be surprised to see it used for messages of faith and perseverance.

“I’m lucky to be able to have graffiti as a background because I can make words dance and move,” he said. “I leverage color and geometry and all of that has its own nonverbal kind of communication to it.”

Gallery

Haviland’s work is on display this month in Madsen Gallery, in Los Altos, California. Owner Amy Madsen said she found his work on Instagram.

“His work really caught my eye,” she said. “And the way he visually looks, he’s got lots of art on his body.”

Haviland is heavily tattooed.

“All of my friends’ dads were sailors, Marines. You’d watch Popeye as a kid. I was just meant to have tattoos,” Haviland explains.

It was Haviland’s incorporation of scripture in his work that finally caused Madsen to reach out to him.

“You don’t see that every day,” she said.

One gallery patron told Madsen that he “...could feel every single emotional matter that Jared has gone through, just by looking at his work. So it’s always fun when you get a strong reaction.”

Graffiti is art

“People don’t like hearing it — I guess I don’t really care — but tagging is an art form,” Haviland says.

He says a tag is both an identifying marker and art, expression and identity. To those who practice it, it can become an obsession.

“I poured my whole heart into it. Even though no one supported me,” Haviland said. “I ignored every single person that told me no. And I’ve persevered.”

Although his street-art days are behind him, graffiti is not.

“I’ve grown into something new,” he said. “It was one stepping stone to the next. That was my journey.”