I ran across a folder of old sketches, and found a few outlines that had been painted. Ive never been a good copier, and thus have always been interested in A, people who can copy things well and B, the process by which things are copied by others and myself. As a by product of my poor copying skills Ive always treated sketches as ideas to be treated fairly irreverently. I also am generally more fascinated by the sketches and or stages of a piece that reveal the inner workings of the thing and give clues as to where the create was while doing it. Anything that aims to answer all the questions it poses seems more or less useless to me. You might as well hit the lecture circuit. I enjoy things that leave me thinking, confused and or upset; something that forces me to reconsider what i thought i knew; Obviously thats a bit lofty for graffit but it applies to varying degrees of deepness in all art.
This first sketch, is one in a series of sketches that were mentally game changing. I had been struggling to get around the Graffiti formula of element hierarchy. Something thats always bothered me about graffiti was the somewhat arbitrary elements that are part and parcel of the movement. They had a reason in the beginning. You paint a train that been mashed by tags, obviously a cloud or bubble background is gonna give the eye some breathing room to differentiate your piece from the scrawl of tags, and appreciate the work you did. That being the case a cloud is a requirement if you’re in complete control of the space youre painting, so why is the cloud still the norm?
What I was able to figure out, was that that formula was arbitrary now. Its one of those things ive always struggled with, which is funny considering the art of graffiti is all about breaking the rules, yet here i was locked into a set of rules. It was a low level zen moment, i feel like most people would just get, i they thought about it, but it took me the better part of 20 years, whats more is i had figured out the same thing as applied to a plethora of other shit. So in this sketch my plan was to confuse the structure by pushing some pieces of the letters backwards into the cloud area.
A lot of the time when painting i’ll have a few recent sketches in mind but none on hand, you can see from this one that i had it at the wall and it got covered in over spray. below is the finished piece.
ABOVE: Toronto, painted with the HSA squad, Bacon, Kane, ArtChild, Scam and Slon (hemps), along side Kem5, Ges, Enue, Wane.
BELOW:
This was the site of one of the best practical jokes I have ever pulled off. I was painting with kem5, Ges, and Soem. At one point Ges stepped away from his area and while he was gone i took the can he was outlining with and painted the donut of a random can the same has his outline color, and replace the faked can with his outline can ( if you dont know many types of spray paint come with a slim piece of plastic [the donut] under the nozzle that is painted the same color as the paint in the can). Trap set, the wait began. After a little while Ges returned and got ready to continue out lining his piece, he picked up his out line can, which as you may remember much like the Sanka commercials had been secretly replaced. He put the can to the wall and did a little line that stopped fairly quickly. His face transformed from work mode to one of pure confusion. He checked the donut, yup thats the outline color. He trys it again. Dam it what the fuck it going on here? At this point im pratically on the floor pissing my pants. Watching the whole process from confusion to discovery was priceless. I am now wating for Ges to get me back, its been almost 3 years and im still waiting, vigilantly, sleep is the cousin of death kid. Im ready.
