Hustler. Entrepreneur. Hip graffiti artist. Hopeless romantic. All of these labels have been applied to David Brunning, a.k.a. thekidbelo. Oddly enough, they all fit.

The 29-year-old visual artist was born and raised in the small town of Onoway, 45 minutes west of Edmonton, population 875. In a route that’s taken him from snowboarding and skateboarding in rural Alberta, to freestyle rapping in Edmonton nightclubs, to graffiti painting in downtown Calgary, this “kid” has turned himself into one of the city’s most influential young artists.

Enter his apartment in an old Beltline building just south of downtown, and inside you see a comfortable mishmash of retro sofas and Ikea-style tables and shelves. A dozen pairs of brand-new-looking sneakers are arranged neatly beside a DVD collection that includes, among Brunning’s favourites, Love, Actually and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (“I’m a huge movie geek,” he admits). In his studio room are drop cloths, canvases-in-progress, stacked milk crates filled with spray-paint cans, and a few posters of beautiful women. Spray-painted on a ragged piece of cardboard above it all, not art but humble inspiration, are the words “This is a gift.”

Brunning is a person of almost irreconcilable contradictions. He’s a small-town kid turned urban artist. His chosen medium — graffiti art — is rooted in hip hop subculture, known for subversive expressions of disenfranchisement, anger and loss. Brunning, though, preaches sensitivity and love; he frames his work with themes of “living positive, giving back and moving ahead.”

He’s a self-admitted raging extrovert and social networker; his mannerisms remind one of Brad Pitt: charismatic, charming and exuberant. Yet he also subscribes to the life of the solitary and spiritual artist, preferring to paint by himself, gaining inspiration from movies, reading and walking around the city. He has one tattoo “hidden” on his body: the Chinese character for “alone.”

With a talent for the sale (“Not having much growing up, I learned how to hustle”), Brunning has made himself into one of Calgary’s most commercially successful artists; his clients include the likes of Holt Renfrew, Adidas, the Calgary Stampede and Red Bull. He also has a T-shirt line and plans to launch an Internet company this summer. Yet he takes his art seriously; he says he’d like nothing better than to take three months off to build a personal body of work — he reminisces longingly of the days when artists had patrons.

What binds these contrasts together, makes Brunning real and believable as both artist and man, is his sincerity and his passion for ideas. Though he can initially come off as a hustler, the impression fades. Brunning is the kind of guy you wouldn’t regret spending an afternoon with over coffee discussing armchair philosophy, the importance of art in society or why the second Star Wars trilogy sucked.

As an artist, Brunning’s works are bold: jaggy scripts, designs and imagery, a riot of colours you can see from a mile away. But what gets him jazzed are the few people who get up close enough to see the subtle interleavings of applied paint, softly articulated words and letters hidden in the layers of gloss and matte, meanings one can only see in the shifting light.

“There’s always something deeper,” says Brunning, “There’s layers upon layers, and people can’t get that from just looking at it.” In other words, it’s not obvious — kind of like thekidbelo himself.