Graffiti legends Lady Pink and Smith sprayed the finishing touches on their last mural for the season in late November at 5 Pointz in Long Island City, leaving the public with some new art before the cold closed down this graffiti mecca until spring.

“They still persecute us like we’re some sort of villains, but what (graffiti) really is, is urban art,” said Lady Pink, who was born Sandra Fabara in Ecuador and raised in Astoria, Queens, New York, where she still lives. “It’s folk art. And it’s one of the few arts, aside from Jazz, that America has bred.”

Pink began her prolific career as an urban artist in 1979 at the age of 15 after her former boyfriend was arrested and forced to go back to Puerto Rico.

“I started writing his name everywhere because I was heartbroken,” she said.

The heartbreak spawned a new romance for the next six years with the dark, and sometimes dangerous, subculture of the graffiti world.

“Girls are always getting accused of being soft and incapable. For a while I was the only female to hold it together and I stuck with the movement because of that. The younger girls see me as a role model and I try to live up to it,” said Pink as she tied back her signature hip-length hair before climbing the ladder.

“I grew it for nefarious purposes,” she said with a smile, referring to her hair. “We got the five-finger discount. I could hide seven or eight cans (of spray paint) just on my back. Then it became my trademark, and I kept it. Now I think it’s the hippie in me that keeps it,” she said.

But by 1985, Pink said she had grown up enough and did not want to run around in the dark anymore or be arrested. For the next nine years she stuck exclusively to the fine arts, catapulting herself into another dimension of her artistic career, exhibiting her work at such landmark institutions as the Whitney, the Metropolitan and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Then in the early 1990s, two young graffiti writers staying with her from out of town desperately wanted to paint the subways, which she said was incredibly difficult to sneak into by that point.

“I had to dig up the last subway painter,” Pink said. His name was Smith. “He only agreed if I went. “I said, ‘I’m too old to run from the cops and if we get caught, you run and I’ll just stay here and get arrested,’”

When the police did arrive, Pink said her instincts kicked in and she bolted.

“Then you’re all covered in soot, bleeding from the knee,” she said.

As it turned out, this would be the couple’s first date. Six months later, Lady Pink and Smith were married.

“We were just made for each other,” said Pink. Smith convinced her to get back into public art.

“He made me realize how easy it was to get a permission wall. You just had to ask,” said Pink. The couple now co-owns a mural business based out of Astoria.

One of the biggest adjustments Lady Pink finds when creating art in public is the ever-present audience and noise.

“Unfortunately, I can’t spray-paint and wear my headset. I got to hear the spray paint. It starts and stops. The old school generation needs to because we’re used to spraying in tunnels and in the quiet. It’s like playing your video games on mute,” Pink said.

The public art also has a temporary lifespan. In the prime of summer, the murals could be up for as little as one day before another artist paints a different design over them. But Pink said the pros of public art by far outweigh the cons.

“Sharing our work with everyone, old people, young people, that is just a different feeling than a wealthy woman with diamond rings patting you on the back. We beautify our community,” said Pink. She earns enough from fine art to create public art for free and teach her craft to younger generations.

Twice a year Pink creates a mural with students from the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Long Island City. The youth must design all their own work and she helps them enlarge it.

Pink said she likes it, “When kids are painting these walls and they’re laughing. You don’t need years of schooling. We’ve brought art back to the reach of regular people and we’ve brought fun back.”