PEOPLE: The World’s a Canvas

To know Craig Cormier, one needs only to look at his work. Using handcrafted stencils, Craig incorporates a quirky and eccentric mix of images in his homemade projects and spray painted walls. He says that making his own stencils is a labor of love, and each one is significant in its own way. "When I look through the boxes of stencils I've made over the years, I remember the reasons and the ideas behind them and the places I've sprayed them," he says. "I use the world as a canvas." In fact, Cormier used that idea for his senior thesis project at Lamar University in May 2011. His idea is to promote the use of graffiti by developing public places where spray paint would be acceptable. He draws inspiration from his own real-life experiences as well as street artists such as Banksy, the pseudonymous British graffiti artist, and Shepard Fairey, an American contemporary graphic designer most famous for the Obama "Hope" poster. "I really got hooked when I visited Chicago a couple years back — the amount of art on the subways and streets really gave the city an artistic edge and soul," Craig says. "When I came home, I had the itch to start that here. One of the coolest things to me now is seeing the graffiti grow around this area."