Click to play blip.tv

Turn the mirror over and it's "The Crucifixion." From a sea of blood emerges a hand clutching a heart. In the background, a devilish serpent is wrapped around the globe. The handheld heart recurs throughout Hayes' work. He says it's a symbol of human love, both in Christ and in ourselves.

Even though the bulk of his work centers on Christianity, it's theologically open-minded and is more philosophical than religious. Above his bed hangs a painting of two doors floating in space, one symbolizing creation, the other nonexistence. Between the two is a door in limbo, symbolizing man.

Much of the time, the frames are simply embossed extensions of the paintings, as if Hayes just needed a bigger canvas and couldn't afford one. His use of mirrors and wood as canvas is half creative impulse, half financial constraint. Hayes lives mainly off Social Security and supplements his income by selling his art for $20 to $50 apiece.

Money not spent on sustenance and art supplies goes into his startup safe-sex organization, Heart to Heart, which is still, and may forever be, in its nascence; there are more types of distributive literature than there are members, whom Hayes tries to wrangle by passing out his admonition-soaked business cards. "Remember cowboy keep your gun in your holster and ther [sic] won't be any trouble," one card reads below a picture of a reservoir-tipped pistol. "That's LAW."

On First Fridays, Hayes is down in Old City with his grocery cart, hoping one of the gallery owners will notice his work and schedule a showing. Two years ago his work hung in a hybrid art gallery/community center on Girard Avenue. It was his first and only showing.

When he approached the owners of the Old City galleries, they told him he needed to type a biography and explanation of his work.

"I don't read well and I don't spell well," says Hayes, citing his early exit from education. Of course, it's likely not for lack of a written bio that he has been denied a showing; his work wouldn't comfortably hang next to the abstract expressionism in posh Old City galleries. But he doesn't mind if his first gallery showing was his last.

"Things come to mind that I wouldn't normally think of if I didn't have a brush in my hand," he says. "If I never get in a gallery, I'm gonna always figure out things to get across to people."

(andrew.thompson@citypaper.net)