Yellowknife (Aug 18/03) - Quenton Panegyuk is a 25-year-old artist who once spent endless hours spray painting graffiti under train bridges.

Now he paints on canvas, sells his work, and has been hired to spray paint a mural on the roof of the Legion. Next year, he will study animation at Algonquin College in Ottawa.

Graffiti artists usually have a tag -- a word or name that represents them. Panegyuk's tag is the name given to his grandfather when he died -- Kivea. It means Spirit of Water.

He uses elaborate lettering techniques to paint his tag, which he often intertwines with renderings of birds, snakes and fish. One piece shows a raven holding the tag in its beak. Another is a cartoonish man staring up at the word Kivea.

As a teenager, Panegyuk was influenced by hip hop movies. He started scribbling the graffiti he saw on television, but it never really looked right, he said.

Then he moved to Kingston. "That's where I met my friends who graph and they brought me out one day."

They would sneak under train bridges and spend hours painting and re-painting over their work. That's where he honed his skills and learned to control the nozzles of the cans, he said.

"We went there endless times. No one could see it, it was just under a bridge. It was our gallery." Once, while taking the train, he pointed out his work to his mother.

"I said, do you see that graffiti? I did it. She loved it. We talked about the art that I do. She didn't mind it."

But when he moved back to Yellowknife, he switched to canvas, for the most part.

"Yellowknife's too small. I'm 25-years-old and I don't want to get caught," he said. Most graffiti artists want respect in the graffiti community and they want to get known. But that's difficult in a small town, he said. "You'll get known by the cops."

But people outside of law enforcement are definitely noticing this unique artist. At a Yellowknife art show last year, he sold most of his work. The mural above the Legion will feature Northern animals and a graffiti background. He's been offered a chance to graph another mural, although the details haven't been worked out. And recently, he was invited to Edmonton to graph on a legal wall with other artists.

So what does he think about people who hit buildings around Yellowknife?

"Some buildings shouldn't be touched," he says. "It just depends."

He thinks the graffiti artists in Yellowknife are underdeveloped and need to practice on paper. "It took me a long time to get where I'm at. Three or four years of drawing on paper."

A friend told him to get better, he should practice every day. "That's what I do. I draw and draw and draw."

"I know lots of people don't like it. That's their view. I'm not going to argue. But it's my life. It's what I do. I love it."

Panegyuk has also started teaching art to young offenders. It's something he finds incredibly rewarding. "They are the greatest kids," he said.

"They get along with me easy. We joke around. I used to be a little punk when I was younger, so I know where they are coming from."