Issue 07
Montana Spray Paint
By Simon SteinhardtIllustration By Kristian Henson
Art is everywhere these days. Well, almost everywhere. In truth, this generation’s artistic revolution is as much a counter current to the blandness inherent in widespread mass production as it is a sociopolotical rebellion. We’re essentially painting over the bare cinder blocks of our prefabricated society. Not only are we starting to demand more beauty in our public landscape, we’re also creating markets for innovative products that satisfy our increasingly urgent thirst for the one supreme element: Quality, Rarely do we see a marriage where the craft of beautification is bolstered by the functional elegance of design, and there may be no better example of such a perfect union than that of the graffiti world and one of its pioneering pillars, the Montana Colors spray paint company.
The birth of Montana Colors, like that of so many groundbreaking business, took place at the intersection of endless demand and inadequate supply. When graffiti writers MOOCKIE and KAPI opened the Bunker Store graffiti supply shop in Barcelona, SPain, in 1993, they were the first retailers to sell spray paint specifically for graffiti purposes. Customers frequently came in looking for the ideal instrument for their are, but there was no such device. Spray paint distributer Jordi Rubio, who provided MOOCKIE and KAPI with the financial backing to open the store, agreed with the writers that the cans he supplied, just like those of every other brand in the market, were less than ideal for graffiti. As KAPI puts it, the success of the store “reflected a latent market with many possibilities,” so the trie decided to pool their expertise and create the perfect graffiti spray can. In 1994, the brand-new Montana Colors factory on the outskirts of Barcelona produced the first cans of spray paint ever created by and for graffiti artists.