There aren’t many places in California that boast long, legal, public walls open to graffiti artists. But in southeast Fresno, in the unincorporated community of Calwa, there’s a quarter-mile cinderblock wall that’s open to street artists year-round.

“This wall is special,” says Ricky Watts, an aerosol artist from Sebastopol. “This is one of the few places in the state of California where they have a wall like this, this size. There’s no other place like this, really.”

And every year, for the past three years, Watts and other members of a graffiti crew called Lords have come from all over the state for a daylong festival in late January memorializing their founder. It’s called the Bizare Art Festival, named after Salvador “Bizare” Lujan. Bizare started the crew 30 years ago in San Jose when he was just a teenager.

“A lot of guys here have been inspired by him,” says Bizare’s sister, Serena Lujan. “They were taken off the streets, taken away from gangs, to be a part of this crew that didn’t have anything to do with that type of lifestyle.”

Serena says Bizare was a gentle character who wanted to unite his friends around something positive and creative -- art, music and dance. “He was more of a quiet type, but he had a lot to say,” she adds.

Bizare died of a heart attack three years ago when he was just 44. And that’s when Serena started this yearly festival.

“Instead of being at home mourning his passing, I’d rather be here celebrating his life,” she says.

About 80 artists typically paint the wall for the festival, including a tattoo artist from San Diego, whose graffiti name is Payne. But before he draws long lines of spray paint on a black surface, he shakes up one of his cans to make sure it has a good spray.

“This might be an old can,” he says. “I might need to get a different tip.” He searches through a box of caps and changes out the old one.

“Sometimes they take a little work, and also weather’s playing a part. It’s kind of cold out. Cans like to be warm,” he says with a laugh.

Like the other artists here, Payne is putting up his name in huge, colorful letters. He calls it a Payne piece, as in masterpiece. Although the crew started in San Jose, Payne says it has spread to other parts of the state and beyond.

“Now we’re all the way down south, across the pond and into Europe,” he says. “We got members all over the world now. It’s a big crew.”

He says it’s mostly made up of working-class guys who like hip-hop, letters, music and dancing.

“We just have graffiti in our blood. We like to paint. We’re artists. This is the medium, it’s larger than life,” he says.

To become a crew member, you have to get noticed, he says. “Just kind of show dedication,” he says. “I won’t talk too much about exploits. But you know, it’s a lot of cred. What you do on the street. You know, just putting up the crew and representing.”

Payne’s been putting up the crew for 20 years. He’s 44 now and owns a tattoo parlor in San Diego, so he treads a little more gently these days.

“I tend to keep it more legal. I have a family, I’ve got two little girls, I’ve got a business, you know, so I’m not trying to go out and kill it the way I did when I was a kid. But I still love to do it and as much as I can,” he says.

Farther down the wall, Match, a musician from the Bay Area, explains why choosing a graffiti name is important.

“Every one of us painting the wall today has a great appreciation of typography and fonts and letters in general,” he says.

Like everyone else here, he’s kind of secretive. He won’t tell his real name or the name of his band, or even what town he lives in.

He says good street art means mastering your letters. “We write them over and over again like crazy people on pads of paper from the day we start until the day we die. I’ve probably spent at least two hours every day of my life writing my name over and over again, destroying paperwork, scrap papers and phone books and Bibles in hotels.”

Forty-five-year-old Quake is a few spots down the wall from Match. He started writing graffiti some 30 years ago. He says he’s been caught for painting in illegal spots.

“I think I got busted for the first time big in 1989,” he says. “I got a lot of hours, 200 community service hours, $4,000 in fines. That’s actually what got me into the piecing aspect.”

Piecing is more labor intensive, more complex. It comes from the word masterpiece. “The essence of graffiti is through the tag,” Quake says. “You basically make it bigger, start adding fancy, pretty colors and people appreciate it a little more, I guess. It’s more acceptable.”

Today Quake owns an art and apparel company, but his background is in logistics. He worked in the corporate world for years, a kind of dual life, he says. These days, he still paints lots of illegal spots near his home in the East Bay.

“Spillways, bridges, stuff like that. I just basically go where I can’t be bothered. I’m not really looking to do this to make money. It’s just my hobby. It’s something for me to release. All the frustrations of day-to-day life, I take them out on the wall.”

But others do make money using spray paint as their medium. Ricky Watts is a fine artist, muralist and illustrator. His most recent work was a huge mural on the old YMCA building in St. Petersburg, Florida.

He says he used to sneak out at night as a teenager to paint graffiti, but what he loved most was art.

“I knew early on I loved using spray paint. I wasn’t interested in the vandalism side of it, you know. I really wanted to do big colorful artistic pieces.”

And today, the colorful piece he’s doing is a tribute to Bizare.

“I’m doing these large simple letters that are going to be very readable, and then inside the letters, I’m gonna take Bizare’s old sketches, and I’m gonna sketch out his letters inside the big letters,” Watts says.

It’s the kind of perspective Bizare would appreciate. Ricky Watts and other Lords crew members’ work can currently be seen on display at the Oakland Terminal Gallery.