Issue 16
EINE.
By EINE
Everything you hear about the English is true. The teeth are getting better because we have been growing a culture of celebrity nobodies for the last decade. If you ask a class of 10-year-old school kids what they want to do when they grow up, none of them want to be train drivers or astronauts—they want to be famous. But you c an’t be famous if you’re a fat ugly spod with bad teeth, so across the country teeth are get ting better in the va in hope that gleaming white teeth will help their quest for fame. Something else we are quite well known for is our binge drinking. I am not sure how tr ue this is, but our newspapers would have us believe that we have a teenage army of alcoholics in every town or city, all drunk out of their tiny minds, beating 10 tons of shit out of each other—but at least they have good teeth.
We are really lucky in England. We have a culture that loves the maverick. We all have a mad side to us; we love the weirdo/hero. On top of that, we support our artists, and treat them almost li ke celebrities. S ome of our artists are household names, and because of this we have a wider understanding of art.
We are in a place with the police where most of them still think that they have better things to do than arrest someone putting up a sticker or poster. Zero tolerance is not on their agenda, thankfully.
When I was in my early teens I got into this new thing that came from America called breaking. It was mad. You could g ive yourself a name like Crazy Legs or Turbo. With this d ancing was new music that mum a nd dad hated, and this was very important. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do this dance for love or money, but as with all good new yout h movements there is something for everyone, and that something was graffiti.
I started tagging because I couldn’t breakdance. I was 13 or 14 and everyone was getting into the new craze that had been shipped over from America—rapping, breakdancing and graffiti. All the kids everywhere started wearing the same-colored hooded tops and hanging out in the street with ghetto blasters. I was the graffiti kid in our crew. Pathetic really. But it led me to where I am now.
I started writing my new name everywhere I went and all over everything. I soon met new friends that were doing the same thing and we formed crews and would go out on nightly missions to spray our tags all over town. Some of us got caught and were grounded, but mostly we carried on. Not long after everyone was either spinning on their heads or spraying the neighbor’s fence, the Rubik’s Cube came out and that was it, I was the only one left.
I have been at it ever since then. As I got older and would travel further into the field, I would meet other writers and go out bombing with them. I was introduced to the excitement of the train yards and very quickly my house was getting raided by the police. If I wanted to carry on doing this and not wind up in prison, I would have to learn fast.
In school, I was only interested in meeting the owners of the tags I would see in the playground. As I got older and started traveling further from home, it was the tags along the train lines—I knew that was what I wanted to do. I gradually met more and more writers and before long I was spending nights in bushes waiting for the cleaners to finish their jobs so I could start mine.
We had to learn pretty quickly: Never have any graffiti-related items in your home—no paint, no black books, no photos, nothing. The police could knock on the door at any time. Always have your stories straight. If the police stopped your car you have to be able to explain why you are 200 miles from home at two in the morning with a car full of spray paint or, worse, a camera with yard shots of three top-to-bottom cars. We would take all the precautions we could.
I have never been one for going out bombing with large groups; it always seemed like a recipe for disaster or a night in the cells. I’ve preferred one or two close partners—you get to know each other, you spend a huge amount of time with this person, you think the same way, you have the same goals. There is a trust, a bond that builds up: [writers like] ABLE and DREPH, when we destroyed the insides of the Circle and “Little Met” [train line], SPIKE and OKER for British Rail, ELK for traveling the country, and NEMA for doing the most amount of train pieces.
Nowadays, I am a street artist. There is a massive difference between what I did and what I do now. I have grown mellow with age. Unfortunately, I got old and running away from police, who were younger than I was, seemed a bit wrong. I had also been arrested more times than I cared to remember. It was getting close to the time where the judge would have to send me to prison. The idea of going to prison at thirty-something for painting a train started to look like a bad career move.
By this time, I had left my “proper job.” I spent about 12 years in a suit and tie, working for Lloyds of London—it’s a building in the city that looks like an oil rig, and is full of insurance companies. A lot of what I did was dealing with EPA, health hazards, asbestos and breast implant claims against North American companies. It paid well, and I could get away with murder, but in the end it became too much living two lives, so I left. Ever since then I have been trying to make a living as an artist, in one way or another. I have worked with all the regular suspects—Nike, Adidas, Nokia, etc. I have designed and made T-shirts and sold them exclusively in Japan. For the last five years, I have worked as a screen printer for a company called Pictures on Walls (POW). POW works with about 25 artists and basically they give us a painting and then we turn it into a screen print, sell it on our website, and then give them some money. It’s a very successful and simple idea. The whole time I have been into graffiti I have also painted canvases and tried to sell them. In the last few years I have started to concentrate more and more on this. I now have a few places that sell my work and every year I try to do a show in London.
I feel that I am in a really lucky position. I paint what I like in the street and then I have a studio where I can play around with different ideas and effects, the kind of things you could never do on the street. One of the things I have been working on lately is concrete on canvas. I also enjoy the layers and depth you can build up on a canvas. Although street and the studio are quite different, there are challenges to overcome in both areas.
As I have grown up, the motives behind what I do have changed. Graffiti, for the most part, is done for fun and excitement and for the closed world of other vandals. If anyone other than writers can’t read it, understand it, or even notice it, I didn’t care. It was purely done for me. The things I paint now are done for an audience. I want people to see them and I want them to last. I think this is the way for a lot of street artists. What I paint now is a better representation of me and who I am.
It’s hard to explain how I come to write the words I do. “Monsters” is just a cool word. I like the imagery it conjures up. It is also a word I have written throughout my writing career. I have painted it on trains, walls and canvases. I chose to paint “vandalism” and “scary” because they are always used to describe graffiti. We also have a continuous debate about whether street art is art or vandalism. Well, my vandalism piece was painted without permission from the owner of the wall so it is criminal damage, and therefore vandalism, but it looks great. It’s a massive improvement on what the wall looked like before. It’s a local landmark. If you stand there for longer than 20 minutes you will see someone get their phone out and take a picture.
One of the reasons I chose “scary” was because of the negative way graffiti is portrayed in the media. People are scared of graffiti because it is a sign that an area is run down and that it isn’t policed. If you can stand there painting graffiti without permission and no one stops you or you don’t get arrested, then what else could you do? Break into my car, my house, attack me, rob me, rape my daughter. Graffiti scares people. I have often spent hours with a brush and pot of paint, painting an illegal wall, and if anyone does say anything, it’s positive. But the moment I shake up the can of spray, all heads turn and the publicgets nasty: “What’s that? Is that graffiti? Do you have permission?” It’s quite funny really, and can totally be used to your advantage.
With regard to the letters I have been painting on shop shutters, the response from the public has been overwhelmingly positive. I think one of the reasons for this is because they don’t think that it is graffiti, and this is one of the reasons street art is a better option for an older writer. The other main reason is that you aren’t confined by a strict set of rules in the way you are with graffiti—graffiti writers have to be true to graffiti, you should rack your paint, bomb the streets, and paint trains. Street art is exciting because you can do anything as long as it is “art” and on the “street.” I have written the word “monsters” by putting different-colored plastic cups in the holes of a wire fence. Every writer I know thinks that it was completely gay, but it looked good. It was effective and it’s still there eight months later. I wanted to do more interesting things on the street, but with the speed of a tag, so this is why I started to make stencils. Putting up a stencil is maybe the most risky element of street art and it’s pretty low risk. Perfect for an older man who still wants to paint stuff.
Most people who stop me when I am painting the letters on the shutters are happy to have finally met the “letter man.” Sometimes I get asked if I would paint their shops. They all have a story about what they thought they were about; quite a few people can remember them from years ago, far longer than I have been painting them. Nearly everyone thinks that [the letters] have made a positive difference to the area. So far no one has punched me in the side of the head as I finish off the outline. So it’s all good. I am having a good time experimenting with stuff on the street.
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