We've all heard the old cliché of the starving artist. In this respect, local painter Melvin Hall is no different. He doesn't make a fortune from selling his works of art, but then again, he doesn't really want to. 

"I can't put a price on this. It was given to me for free," Hall said. "So I tell people to pay what you can."

Hall's demeanor is strikingly humble with somewhat of a political air. One of the missions of Art By Hall Walls, LLC—a company started by Hall and his wife—is to help provide housing for the homeless.

"I'll never let money rule me, but I will use money to help people," he said.

The passion to help the homeless spurred from a number of vacant houses in his neighborhood. Tenants would come and go. In one case the landlord habitually raised the rent after the new occupants first month.

"You just got to stand up for what's right," he said.

Hall seemed to have a genuine concern for his fellow man and felt the need to help those less fortunate through his art.

"Human beings are my inspiration," he said. "I don't think there is anything more beautiful on this earth than human beings."

Raised mainly by his grandmother, Hall is the son of the national best-selling author Nathan Heard, who served as a "good bad example" in his life.

Heard penned his most famous book, Howard Street, while spending time in the New Jersey prison system for armed robbery. He was never really part of Hall's life.

"I always have his shadow over me," Hall said, "which I think has given me inspiration."

After prison, Hall's father went on to be an accomplished author and teacher of creative writing at Fresno State College despite only receiving an eighth grade education.

The love for teaching still runs in the family.

"I really would like to teach," he said. "I can show people how to do this and they could do it as good, if not better, because of their individual personality and whatnot."

At 18, Hall enrolled in Monmouth College in his home state of New Jersey to study art and play basketball. After two and a half years, he called it quits and enlisted in the Army.

"I wish I would have discovered this little talent in college," he said. "Then maybe I would have made A's and B's instead of C's and D's."

After the military, he held a number of odd jobs in Texas and Georgia, always looking for a chance to move up. He then went back to school and got an associate's degree in telecommunications.

He eventually ended up in Powder Springs, working with Comcast for a number of year until a surgery took him out of the workforce. Since then, he has worked on his art full-time.

For the last 15 years, Hall has worked predominantly in a medium he calls "an elevated form of graffiti." He primarily uses spray paints and stencils, although he admits he will use just about any type of paint he can find. 

"I've only been doing this a couple of years," he said. "Fifteen years is just a couple of years."

In his garage studio, paintings line the walls on hardy board canvasses. 

The floor is an oversized masterpiece. The combination of stencils work together to illustrate the good and bad choices everyone faces in life.

His decision to use stencils and spray paint stemmed from a simple idea: to cut out his artwork. He snaps a photo of the finished drawings and proceeds to slice and dice in the process of creating more art.

"An artist's picture is never really finished,"he said, "but you just have to stop after a while."