Here is a “Best of Dennis” column originally published on April 16, 2002 with the headline “Creating Pride – Murals Artist’s Gift to Area” in the Los Angeles Daily News.
If the measure of a great artist is the impact his work has on society, Alfredo Diaz Flores stands with the best who ever picked up a paintbrush.
You won’t find his work in the Sistine Chapel or the Louvre, or hanging in the Guggenheim or Getty.
You’ll find it on block walls in the alley behind Ned Kramer’s Arleta home, or on a wall outside a Canoga Park radiator shop.
You find it in city parks, and on more than 30 public and private buildings in the San Fernando Valley, where the greatest threat it faces isn’t from a caper, heist or forgery. It’s from tagging — graffiti.
That’s the magic of this 76-year-old muralist’s work. Over the past 30 years, it has touched an artistic nerve with the taggers in this city, and they’ve given him a free pass.
Once Flores paints a beautiful mural over their graffiti, they don’t mess with it. They leave it alone and move on.
In 1979, Flores painted a 40-foot-long mural depicting international harmony between Canoga Park and its sister city, Taxco, Mexico.
Twenty-two years later, it remains on the wall outside All Radiator on Remmet Avenue in Canoga Park, untouched except for Flores himself stopping by every 10 years or so to touch it up.
“It’s never been tagged, and in this neighborhood that’s saying something,” said John Gerardo, an employee of the radiator shop.
Ned Kramer agrees. After church one Sunday a few weeks ago, he asked Flores to take a look at the graffiti-ridden alley behind his Arleta home.
He had heard of Alfredo’s reputation, knew that if anyone could change that alley for the better, and keep it that way, it was Flores.
“He’s painted some of the most prominent murals in the San Fernando Valley, and the taggers leave them alone,”‘ said Kramer. “It’s a respect for the artist and the…
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