Burst Bubbles (2001)
April 11th, 2009
“So sick n’ tired of people trying to burst our bubbles!!!”, Alert writes at the end of this bubble-style “Raws Alert” piece in Nottingham. Seems my aspirations were violent lime green and he was mainly dreaming of sausages.
Rare occasion when I timed myself painting – the evil bubble-burster character in the middle took me 12 mins.
SHOKIN’! (1991)
March 28th, 2009
This was a bit of a seminal piece for me. This idea of making one big thing up out of lots of symbols and having a sort of disjointed narrative is the main idea that kept coming up for me over the years and eventually became my organic idea.
They say every artist has one main idea that they have to find and refine, I think this is probably mine. Looking at it now, it’s sort of like a really crude childish Rosenquist or Rauschenburg, not that I’d even heard of them at the time.
Anyway, from left to right: an “S” made from glass balls with characters and symbols in, an “H” made from spraycans and a joint, the “O” is a drunk character, his can of cheap alcohol makes the back of the “K”, then war comes and completes it in the shape of a gun (I’d just got back from Brooklyn), the “I” – peace is king in the form of a pack of rolling papers with a crown for the dot, and lastly an abstract “N” made from lots of smaller ones.
Also in this piece, you can see the light fading effects I developed having studied Scribla TCA’s fills back in the 80’s and my jellies – those are really early precursors of what would become the organic style.
They’re Here (1999)
March 14th, 2009
In Nottingham – organic “Shoc” on the left and a Daz piece on the right.
He complained my piece was about to eat his so I gave him the pitchforks to defend himself with. The title is from the film “Poltergeist”.
He Say She Say (1999)
March 12th, 2009Seak was being neurotic about other graffiti people cussing him behind his back so I did a chain of characters rumour-mongering and added snippets of gossip in the middle – “…toys! … really? … should keep it real… they said … I heard that he … he can’t … he’s never … blah blah blah”.
He painted one of his spaceship letter pieces on the right and kindly added my name on the side. It looks like he’s using it as a shield from the bad-mouthing! It was in Cologne.
Conflict on Planet ES (1999)
March 9th, 2009I hadn’t slept a minute in 56 hours – we were on German man time and had travelled across the country from Cologne to Bonn.
After a sleepness overnight train journey on bunks with Seak and two strangers all snoring in chorus, we arrived at the gallery. The curators were lovely and loaded me up with caffeine but I was just totally brain dead by that point and honestly didn’t think I could pull it off. We were on a tight schedule and it had to be painted right there and then. The pressure was on.
I was staring at the expanse of white wall outside the gallery daydreaming of snow like an idiot when inspiration struck.
I’d painted my first organic piece the year before based on John Carpenter’s “The Thing”, and my imagination hurtled me back to the frozen wilderness where the nightmare took place.
Seak’s work was shiny spaceship letters so I went off on one with a B-movie narrative where his piece had landed on an alien planet and mine smashed through the ice and attacked it. I just freestyled the thing straight onto the wall.
Here is the complete wall :
The “C” was based on a picture in an encyclopedia of a giant spider crab attacking a Japanese diver that freaked me out as a kid in the 70’s.
It’s a really ironic one bearing in mind how much we conflicted during the period we were collaborating. A telling piece indeed.
Vorsprung Durch Technik (2000)
March 8th, 2009In the seminal 1983 documentary “Style Wars” Tony Silver quips, “In New York, graffiti writing is a vocation”.
Well in Germany it really is.
Getting Up in Hamburg had flown over a group of great writers from around the world to do a major exhibition called Urban Discipline. As well as a formal show, a load of walls got painted round the city.
“Vorsprung Durch Technik” (roughly: Advancement Through Technology; as in Audi ads). “Graff the German way …. definitely ain’t easy … they work you HARD … but it’s all worth it when you get the flicks”.
Left to right – “Cool” by Daddy Kool (DE), a character yells “ARBEIT!” (WORK!), a “Wish” piece by Ces (USA), a character kicking a can in frustration, a Seak (DE), a character getting forced awake at dawn to paint, a “Per” (USA), a digital abstract style “SHOK” and a homesick character to round it off.
I made art imitate life as Daddy Kool – who had arranged the wall – demanded that everyone paint their pieces the same style – same 3D, same colours, same designs etc. I guess he wanted it to be a Seen P-Jay wholecar type thing but we weren’t feeling the idea of it being quite that restrictive. Per wanted to “hook up” his piece with some fading and effects and I wanted to do some weirdo computer style I had been experimenting with.
I argued about it with him (as best as you can with an 8 foot tall hairy German) and in the end I made the dispute into the point of the piece and the others were cool with it. Funnily enough, after this piece Daddy Kool’s letters started looking a lot like mine.
Horrible quality photo, sorry. I’ll replace it if I can get hold of a better version.
Here are some character closeups to make up for it. I asked Ces if he could paint a photo of the piece he’d just done and he did this tiny version of it.
Ces had already been in Germany for a couple of months. He told me he’d been doing a commission with Loomit in Munich. He was up on a scaffolding painting a logo and came afoul of German perfectionism, being forced to redo it over and over again to correct minor imperfections. In the end, he lost the plot and started raining cans down on the foreman hahaha! So I painted a little vexed character for him at the end of his piece. “All graffed out”, as he put it.
Ripped Apart by Mental Explosions (1999)
March 7th, 2009
In Germany, Cologne to be exact. This was a quick bonus beats after the main piece. I painted a eureka character with the head detonating and Seak did his abstract spaceship letter bits as the shrapnel.
I played a negative space game with it – if you look at the background you get a letter “I” full of idyllic scenery. The big “I am”.
Swimming in Daddy’s Big ‘Ole Nuts (1992)
March 6th, 2009
It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.
Long before spraypainting on things became trendy, some of us would travel way out into the middle of nowhere just to have a place to paint big walls in peace. Ascot was a good example of this – a drainage tank with wicked walls, huge flat expanses of delicious concrete canvas ready for burners and beef alike. There was way more to Royal Ascot than toffs and ornate hats at the races.
Here’s Stylo and I riffing on the Grand Puba Maxwell lyric from the time. I got testicular on yo’ ass with inexplicably blue sperm characters. The first one has a Camberwell Carrot of a spliff with BYI crew letters in the smoke, the next is blinging with a chunky gold “S” medallion, the last rocks a Guardian Angels beret. Don’t ask me why … should have put a raccoon tail on it.
This picture pretty much sums up the Ascot experience – deer and foxes ambling through delightful forestry and a tank full of finest vandalism and more mud than Glastonbury Festival. I slipped over in that shit and had to borrow clothes from Stylo to go out that night.
Over on the left you can just about see Dref beefing at Rough for calling him “his little protege”. Fat silver letters right through his new piece.
Contents Under Pressure (1998)
March 4th, 2009Brits abroad in Cologne, Germany. “Meanwhile, back inside the spraycan … contents under pressure.”
Skore had the idea to do the pieces still inside the can on their way out to the world, so I invented characters of the steel ball bearings inside (if you listen carefully, you can hear their voices rattling on when you shake the can).
There was a cycle path directly behind us when we were painting, I kept forgetting and stepping back into it to check my work. Bloody hell those Germans can make a little tring-tring cycle bell sound vicious.
Left to right : a “Kiloh” piece, a ball bearing character asks, “Does it flow?”, at the top is a formation of cheerleading balls spelling “SHOK”, then a militant tanktrack-looking red “Skore” overlooked by a ball bearing with Elvis delusions (uh-huh huh). Lastly, a standard metallic “Seak” is just about to squirt out into the world. “There they go again”.
It was a spur of the moment concept so I made the characters up straight onto the wall. Strange things happen when you freestyle – one of them is definitely Hitler and another is my dad. Weird.
Detail shots:
After this one, I started getting invited out to Europe to paint and do exhibitions regularly.
Invadin’ Your Space (1999)
March 1st, 2009
I hadn’t heard of monsieur le Space-Invadeur at the time or I wouldn’t have done the concept.
This was at a great event called Fat Caps. It was in the back of a chip shop in Birmingham so it was bound to be good.
Left to right: A nice “Prime” tag that I cut the background in around, some space invader characters and a “SIN” mainframe style by yours truly, a pale devil of a “Skore” armed with gothic spearheads, an “FKS Bone” by the man and finally a “Raw” mainframe by me with more going down than up in the arrow department. I threw in an Asteroids background to bring it together a bit better.
