Michael Martin, aka Iz The Wiz passed away in June at age 50. The tragedy is Martin came from a broken home, had little education, but turned to the only art form open to him, which was graffiti on the New York subway system. Its vandalism, but well executed the distinction between crime and art becomes at worst, artistically subversive. The other problem is that in 1996 Martin was diagnosed with kidney failure, the result of using aerosol paint in industrial quantities. He spent the rest of his life on dialysis. 
Fittingly, Martin grew up in Ozone park, New York. In the early 1980’s he claims to have painted 25 subway cars top to bottom per year in 1981 and 1982. The notoriety among taggers could not transform itself into a steady income in the art world and he died as a cult figure in poverty. ”Iz the Wiz sought fame, and found it, but not on gallery walls. His work appeared on the old dusty brown subway cars known as coal mines, and their replacements, called ding dongs for the bell tone that chimes when the doors close. Painting one of those end to end, Mr. Martin once said, ‘was like sex in a can’ “.
The paint is highly toxic.inflammable and could plausibly be banned due to the toxicity of the solvent base and the danger of off-gasses from the product residue.The aerosol sprays contain lead and its reccomended to wear a mask and gloves while bombing. Martin himself spoke about his ill health and its relationship to paint in very disturbing and explicit terms. The fumes are also addictive, in addition to being damaging to the lungs and heart.Not surprisingly, when he withdrew from the graffiti scene he began an increasingly dependent and destructive relationship with hard drugs.
He found an identity within a sub-culture, one replete replete with its its own lexicon of expressions. “I wanted to do something with myself and be part of something. The neighborhood I was in-it was either become a gangster, a drug addict, a musician or- here’s something new. It was creative, it was secretive,it was a secret society”.The dialect was was an urban hip-hop cockney but the aesthetic was quite new in terms of artistic surface. The style seemed to borrow from the counter-culture animated comic styles of Carl Banks, Robert Crumb et al. due to the organic and psychedelic style. Martin was part of this early genre of street art which later became the break dancing look and his art articulated this new street language of the time very coherently.
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