Revival Pressure SHOK (1995)
April 8th, 2009
Part of a massive canvas myself and some friends did at an event.
I used to like doing these pieces made from different bits – I often had too many ideas I wanted to try out to base a whole piece on one.
Reads – “SHOK”. Jelly style “S” (this will become the organic style a few years later), the “H” is a box of cans tipping out, a gangster apple for the “O” and a straight letter “K” with a crumpled paper background.
Organic Canvases (2004)
April 5th, 2009An organic letter “S” and a hexagonal abstract. Taken on phone camera hence horrible quality.
Negative (2004)
April 4th, 2009I wanted to see if I could paint in negative out of my head (I mean without reference material, not high). I experimented with some abstract canvases based on my organic work :
These were painted in the back of Cargo in East London where Black Rat Press is now based. They let me use it as a studio for a while.
Here are the photos inverted :
I’ll come back to this idea I think.
Mix N’ Match SHOK (2000)
March 30th, 2009
Canvas, 5 x 10ft.
Cryptic Raw (1997)
March 29th, 2009
This is a painting I made for my brother. It’s a little abstract, I wonder if you can work it out …
Real Deal
March 25th, 2009
“Lemme see you wave them Zulu signs”. Here’s a big canvas with some classic 4 elements of hiphop business that I painted for my friend Flowerz’’s Breaks N’ Beats jam in Soho, London.
It was when the B-boying was still underground in a dark grimy little club. I matched the vibe grime for grime by nailing the canvas straight onto the side of the block of council flats I was living in at the time and painting it on the spot. I rolled it up and jumped on the train and that was that.
I unrolled it on the floor when I arrived and Tuff Tim from Rocksteady wanted to break on it. Hah.
Real? (1997)
February 28th, 2009
Painted on wood panels for a documentary about Artful Dodger and myself that aired a few times on Channel 4 in the UK.
“Choose your reality. The most obvious ain’t always the wisest.”
An artist walks through the middle of a chaotic whirlwind of choices, armed with a bag of spraycans and a sketchbook. What path will he follow, is the question.
Bracketed between two “Real?” pieces over shattered danger stripes – on the hardcore side of things, a bomb character with an oldschool red NY “flat” subway car behind it, also with a “Real” piece on. A fat sack of cash stands as a temptation. Then there’s a vial of crack and a golden gun. Lastly, a scene of suburban atrophy with the house, the car and the 2.5 kids. He looks at none of it but to the sky.
I’ll post a link to the doc if I can find it online. Probably embarass the shit out of myself.
Self Portrait as a Single Letter 2
February 5th, 2009
Fresh ‘97 canvas (1997)
January 31st, 2009
At 20ft x 10ft, this is the biggest canvas I have painted to date.
It was for Fresh ‘98 which was arguably the best hiphop event ever to take place in the UK, at least since the 80’s. I’ll post more images from the event and go into what made it so special in future posts.
It was painted free-hanging and I could only get a few steps back from it while working so the first time I got to see it was when it was unrolled at the venue.
While I was critiquing it, a unique type of voice rolled out from behind me, “Yo man, that’s tight“. It was Chali 2na from Jurassic 5 who were performing in the UK for the first time. I got on great with them and we had a really good laugh during the event.
We took Nu-Mark out to sample the ghetto end of British beer (I arranged a taste test of Tennant’s Super, Special Brew etc so he could compare them to malt liquor over in the States). I had a minor beef with Akil because I dropped, “More like back stage arse than back stage pass” at some groupie he was chatting. “You didn’t have to go there”, he kept saying over and over.
He was right, I didn’t have to. But I often did!
I was getting some pressure to do a stereotypical hiphop jam crowd scene – classic Mode 2 territory – a bit of a cliche going all the way back to the Mantronik “Needle to the Groove” cover and most likely way before that even.
However, I wanted to try to do something a bit different plus having done a site visit, I realised that the crowd would have been so far back from it that the detail would have been lost. Therefore I decided to do big 10ft high figures in a clean, flat style. However, the canvas proportions were wrong so the DJ ended up being relegated to the background which I wasn’t happy about. All the elements are represented though.
