Pixel Pancho – work in progress

For the last few days, the first MURAL Festival edition has taken over more than 20 walls in Montreal, Canada, located around the oldest boulevard of the city called “the main”, namely Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Running from June 13 to 16, MURAL offers to the public the opportunity to see some of the big masters of street art at work. Street artists, graffiti artists and muralists have been bringing all their energy and their incredible talent to refresh the streets. Among amazing international artists are the best Canadian ones. The list is long, but impressive: Pixel Pancho, ROA, Phlegm, Escif, Reka One, Gaia, LNY, Ricardo Cavolo, FinDAC & Angelina Christina, Labrona, Troy Lovegates (aka Other), Omen, Jason Botkin, Chris Dyer, EnMasse, Stare, Squid called Sebastian, Le Bonnard, Paria Crew, A’shop, Wzrds gng.

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Artist Unknown

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Aline Mairet, a street art blogger and photographer based on in Montréal. Check out her blog here.

Here’s an idea of what you could found when you walk on the streets and alleyways of Montréal. When street art wakes up after a long, cold, snowy winter, the artists bring colour and beauty to the streets. Here is the work of Anser, Labrona, Gawd, Produkt, Chris Dyer, Qbnyc, 500M, Waxhead, Omen, 52Hz, Stikki Peaches, Listen, Wzrds gang and Stela. 

Anser

Labrona and Gawd

Produkt

Mathieu Connery aka 500M

Waxhead

Omen

52Hz, Stikki Peaches and Listen

Stikki Peaches

Gawd

Wzrds gang and Stela

Artist Unknown

And this last piece, a splendid door by Labrona. A commission for En Masse.

Labrona

Photos by Aline Mairet

Toronto is a vibrant, culturally diverse, and immensely creative city, with a strong arts community. Graffiti culture started growing in the 80’s, with the most notable artist being Ren, who is still considered a pioneer in our city and beyond. Since then, Graffiti has been a visible and established part of Toronto. For as long as I can remember, Rush Lane aka Graff Alley has always been comprised of blocks of walls coated in paint, full of new and exciting pieces to find.

Young Jarus and Skam

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Labrona and Gawd

Last fall, Labrona did a mural in the center of the city, in collaboration with MU. He recently decided to finish the bottom of this mural, and invited his friends Gawd, Alex Produkt, and Beeforeo. They painted it freestyle, with out a sketch or plan, and this is the result.

Produkt, Labrona and Gawd

Beeforeo, Labrona and Gawd

Photos by Aline Mairet

I recently met PMER/CATELLOVISION at X On Main in Beacon, New York. He has been kind enough to share with me some of the photos from his extensive collection of graffiti photography. This is the first post of what will hopefully be many, and look back into an era before street art and blogs and Oscar-nominated films, an under-appreciated era in the history of graffiti. Because some Vandalog readers will certainly be less familiar with this kind of graffiti than what we normally cover and because many of PMER/CATELLOVISION‘s photos have undergone edits to become artworks in and of themselves rather than simply documentation, this post starts with his explanation of his photographs. Enjoy! – RJ

“It’s graffiti. I like to twist it up, rock it up, shake it up, fingerfuck to fuck it up. I learned a long time ago not to trust graffiti artists. We’re a rare breed. Cut throat motherfuckers! Wreckless. Disrespectful with a shrug. We DGAF! I rock CatelloVision on each photograph because I deserve it. I earned it. I lived it. It may be your art but it’s still my memory. Besides, I was taught at an early age to write my name on everything. Each picture I choose to edit rocked me upon first seeing it. It’s that “Yo!” factor. Turnin’ the corner to see that wall for the first time, “YO!” Being a little kid in the midst of adults on a train platform while a dope train rolls in, “YO!” It was like Christmas! I had the camera and an endless supply of stolen film. I went everywhere and had friends in the lowest of places. It was the 1980′s and I was a little kid, a Brooklyn graffiti writing scumbag calling himself PM. All I ever wanted was to write my name on a wall and inspire a memory. I’m not sure if I have yet. Everybody is too busy paying attention to sugar coated graffiti dudes. I favor the underdogs. The dudes time forgot. . Graffiti is fucked up like that. You put in all this time and energy and have nothing to show for it in the end but a picture, and most dudes don’t even have that. Graffiti! The greatest sport ever played. It’s method & mischief. It’s Mission. It’s a coked out whore at last call. I’ve danced with this Devil almost 30 years now. It’s the only way I know how to live. It’s how I was brought up. It’s graffiti man! I love it and sometimes it loves me too.”

- PMER/CATELLOVISION: Graffiti’s bitch! A writer, painter, historian and pusher.
Artist, Photographer & Owner of X On Main: A Contemporary Art Gallery located in Beacon NY.

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A note from the editor: This is a guest post by Australian street artist CDH. Although I personally disagree with some of the conclusions CDH reaches in this post, I think it may be the start of a debate well-worth having, and it’s one that connects closely to up upcoming book, Viral Art. – RJ

Street art is primarily consumed as digital images online, rather than as paintings on walls in the physical world. Juggernaut sites like Street Art Utopia pump out new images each day to their million plus audience. Street art fans are likely to subscribe to multiple sites and so this audience encounters far more street art online, than on the streets. The street art fades away but the digital images live on, which makes them the primary cultural product that we engage with.

In many ways it’s very positive; I can view global works from locations I may never visit, or the works may be gone by the time I do visit. It’s also just more efficient; I don’t need to travel all over my city to view the latest works, I can just check out the Melbourne Street Art page. There are many other consequences of online consumption to the street art medium that I don’t intend to investigate here. I’m primarily interested in exploring two consequences of online consumption:

1. Audacity: Before the internet, placing works in a high traffic location was the only way to ensure a large audience (of generally passive observers). Today a work can be painted in any back alley, photographed and shared online with a huge audience of active consumers. Contextual spatial elements like the police station around the corner and the legality of the work are typically discarded online. So connecting with the audience doesn’t implicitly demand the same personal risk.
2. Lifespan: Digital images of street art bounce around the internet long after the original work has been buffed into oblivion. In Melbourne, the limited legal spaces make it common to see writers paint a piece, photograph it and buff it immediately for their mate to use the space. The works exist in the physical world for just a few minutes, but live on indefinitely online. They’re made for online consumption.

Online dissemination has generally diminished the audacity and the physical-world lifespan of street art. In the experiment here, I will take these 2 elements to their logical minimum and reduce them to zero. I have created street artworks that require no audacity and have no physical-world lifespan. I do this by photoshopping street art images into photographs of physical locations. Ultimately if we primarily engage with street art online and the digital image has effectively become the art (rather than the physical object), why not make this cultural production more efficient? This just cuts out the laborious middle step of painting a physical object, to then photograph, to then share online.

Results:

Interpretation:

This is an art experiment, so we should examine these images honestly. My interpretation is this: I think this is an interesting idea but ultimately I think these works are really just a bit shit. If the images were printed out, framed and hung in a gallery it would feel completely in place. But on a street art blog it feels out of place. It seems dishonest. An unspoken rule of street art has been cheated- it’s not on the actual street anymore, so can it even be street art? We had a similar debate in the early 2000s, when street art first transitioned into the gallery system; it’s a weird limbo space outside of what’s really street art. Perhaps it can be called ‘street inspired art’, like the gallery street art was originally described. The term ‘street art’ again appears amorphous and manipulable.

This experiment also draws attention to the idea that street art is really something halfway between art and mountain climbing. These photoshopped street art images are like photoshopping yourself into a picture at the top of Mt. Everest; the real point is that you climbed the mountain, not that you got a photo. Street art is less about the image and more about the task of creating the image. The street art audience is continually fascinated with large scale works. It seems absurd that artistic merit could be proportionate to the scale of a work, but when interpreted through the prism of the ‘audacity and the task’, it seems perfectly reasonable. Perhaps it’s why street art is closely tied to cultures that are intertwined with physicality, like skateboarding or parkour.

What are we actually engaging with when we view street art images online? We’re consuming a digital facsimile of a street work, not the actual street art in its original psychogeographical location. People sometimes falsely believe the photograph is an objective representation of truth. In reality the photographer’s eye subjectively selects images to present. Those images are then open to the same forms of manipulation as the photoshopped images above: Perspectives are forced; contrast and lighting can be adjusted in Photoshop; colours can be enhanced; the photograph might be taken from a crane or an angle that is inaccessible to a viewer in physical reality. So who is really the author of the online content we consume? Is it the street artist, the photographer or a convolution of the two? This photographic subjectivity and influence become even more noticeable when images of the same artwork by different photographers are compared side by side; sometimes they look like completely different artworks. With the online dissemination of the digital image, where exactly does street art end and digital art begin? Perhaps it’s tied up in abstract elements like the intent of the photographer or the place of exhibition.

“The Giant” by Os Gêmeos. Photo by RJ Rushmore.

Photo by Nate Dorr

Photo by AnubisAbyss

Photo by Dylan Pech

Post-Script: Coincidentally, after submitting this article, these photos, which depict one of my pieces, appeared on the Melbourne Street Art Facebook page. The tagging has been photoshopped out of the original image by the photographer. Random experiences like this never cease to amaze me in street art. On a personal level, it’s flattering that someone has taken the time to digitally restore the work but it also demonstrates that the digital image is not an objective record of reality. Similar to a restoration, the photographer constructs their interpretation of my original intention, not the work as it exists today. What if I tagged the work or intended for it to be tagged? Like a photoshopped image of a girl in a magazine, this photograph represents a mutable, aspirational reality. The photographer and I become collaborators in the construction of a new cultural artifact, that is consumed by the online audience but only exists in a digital realm.

Before photoshop. Photo by Melbourne Street Art.

After photoshop. Photo by Melbourne Street Art.

Photos by RJ Rushmore, Melbourne Street Art, Nate Dorr, AnubisAbyss and Dylan Pech

Rone

A note from the editor: This is a guest post by Peter Drew, a street artist originally from Adelaide, Australia.

Although Adelaide’s urban art scene is the underdog to Melbourne, its larger and louder interstate cousin, recent years and new blood have seen Adelaide catching up to Melbourne’s lead. Oi You: Urban Art Festival marks a high point for Adelaide as a private collection of 70 works by ‘the worlds urban art megastars’ visits the city, on view now at the Adelaide Festival Centre through June 2nd.

As crowds flock to the glamour and safety of ‘street art’ in a state gallery, Adelaide’s artists are using the exhibition as a catalyst for painting new walls. In addition to Anthony Lister, Rone and Beastman, local artists Kab 101, Jayson Fox, Vans the Omega, Fredrock, Seb Humphreys, Gary Seaman, Shane Cook and Store are contributing to the +12 murals going up across the city. Organised by Matt Stuckey, this aspect of the festival couldn’t have happened a few years ago. “We actually ended up with more walls than resources to paint them this time” says Matt.

Seb Humphreys

Graffiti first hit Adelaide in the mid 80s and its tradition’s continues with most of the artists involved in the Oi You festival. After trying to eradicate graffiti for years The Adelaide City Council now seems to think that street art is the solution to their problem. According to Adelaide’s Mayor: “it’s frustrating that we spend more cleaning up ugly vandalism and graffiti than we do investing in street art…young artists could be tapping into an opportunity that’s going to bring the city to life.” Read the rest of this article »

Young New Yorkers is a restorative justice, arts program for 16 -17 year olds who have open criminal cases. The criminal court gives eligible defendants the option to participate in Young New Yorkers rather than do jail time, community service and have a lifelong criminal record. After our successful pilot program last year we continue to finance the project by hosting a silent art auction this summer – which would not be possible without the very generous donations of our artists, friends and collaborators – This year we are also publishing a catalog which contains critical essays on Youth Justice, Art as Social Practice and Street Art in order to make connections between these projects and our youth at risk.

The following is one of those essays and we’ll be publishing more of them on Vandalog as we approach the auction – so feel free to join the developing discourse…

We are a self-organized and grassroots effort. If you’ll like to help us find a locale for the auction, donate your time, partner with us or just be more informed please visit our website or Facebook page or write to Rachel@youngnewyorkers.org.

- LNY

A couple years ago I was doing a wheat paste installation on a friend’s outhouse at his rodeo arena. A team roping competition was to start several hours later. I woke up around 5 a.m., drove an hour to the site and started working before sunrise. An 18 wheeler loaded with calves was parked nearby. A white cowboy emerged from the cab and groggily made his way to the outhouse. Upon seeing me he mumbled to himself “…Where else would you find on old black man wallpapering the outside of an outhouse at dawn at a rodeo event on an Indian reservation? Only in America.” We both laughed. In retrospect, it was an improbable moment but in the words of Spaulding Gray, it was also a perfect moment in that it captured the bridge building potential of public art.

That’s the question I get asked most frequently – what the fuck is an old black doctor doing making street art along the roadside on the Navajo reservation? Admittedly, it’s an unlikely journey which upon further inspection it makes perfect sense.

I came to work at a small clinic on the Navajo nation 26 years ago bright eyed and full of idealism and misconceptions. My first misconception was that as an African-American I’d be accepted by the Navajo who I thought would share a sense of solidarity with me as a member of a historically oppressed group like themselves. Wrong. I learned quickly that people here are focused on addressing their daily needs such as herding sheep, hauling water, firewood and/or coal and taking care of family. Acceptance into the community is hard won. There’s an expression amongst people here that unless you’ve walked amongst the Navajo for 2 years, they don’t take you into their trust. They’ve grown weary of outsiders coming to take from them leaving little in return.

My first year here I set up a black and white darkroom. After work I’d go out into the community to spend time with people as they were doing chores around their homesteads or hanging out with their families often getting to photograph these experiences. I’d started shooting black and white film in junior high school. My junior high school experience was unique and in retrospect, was instrumental in influencing my efforts to contribute fully to my adopted community.

I attended a small, alternative school in the mountains of North Carolina called The Arthur Morgan School. The school had 24 students, aged 12 – 15 in grades 7, 8 and 9. Being an actively engaged community member was demonstrated to us in practical terms every day. Each student had work assignments that we’d rotate weekly. The projects involved everything from preparing meals to working in the garden to repairing bridges on the dirt roads around the school. Once a week we’d have community meetings where students and staff would sit around in a large circle to discuss issues affecting our lives at the school. Coming from a traditional, all black public school, I remember being impressed that my opinion in these meetings mattered just as much as anyone else’s including our principal.

During my family practice residency in West Virginia during the early 80s, I’d make frequent trips to NYC hoping to see break dancing on street corners + burners on trains. My dream was to become a member of the Zulu Nation and it was during this time I started experimenting with graffiti.

Public Health Meets Public Art

The Navajo nation is located in the Four Corners region of the U.S. The land area of the rez is 27,500 square miles in size which is larger than the state of West Virginia. It’s home to roughly 160,000 people. Coal, natural gas, oil, uranium are found in abundance here. The Navajo should be one of the wealthiest groups of people living in the U. S. However, because of the way the contracts were written to exploit those natural resources, the Navajo people are amongst the poorest people in the U. S. Health problems on the reservation reflect those of other impoverished communities. Rates of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, teen pregnancy, interpersonal violence are all higher than the national average. The unemployment rate is close to 60%. Yet in the midst of what many from outside the reservation characterize as overwhelmingly dire circumstances, there are people living lives of dignity, celebrating the joys of family, farming and community.

My first intersection of public art and public health occurred shortly after I arrived on the reservation. Concerned with what we considered irresponsible advertising in that it was promoting cheap, sugary drinks in a population plagued with Type 2 Diabetes, a community health nurse and I went out one night to correct a billboard on the reservation.

It used to read “Welcome to Pepsi Country.”

Building Community

Wikipedia defines community as a social unit that shares common values. It goes on to say that “in human communities intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.”

What does it mean then to build community and what are the implications of such an undertaking for someone from another community whose belief system differs from the host community? I didn’t consider any of these questions before I started placing photographs along the roadside.

During my time on the reservation I’d been following street art from a distance. Any time I’d go to a big city with graffiti or street art, I’d seek it out. In the mid 90s I did a project called the Urban Guerrilla Art Assault where I’d place black and white photos on community bulletin boards and in store windows in Flagstaff. In 2004 I traveled to Brazil for the first time and was blown away by the abundance, diversity and caliber of the street art there. I returned to Brazil for 3 months in 2009. The first day of my return the feeling of being alive and intrigued by art on the street made by the people and for the people consumed me again.

There was one guy whose work I saw and liked as I moved around Bahia. His name is Limpo. It turned out that during my last 3 weeks there I rented a flat immediately above his studio. I spent everyday in his studio talking with him and street artists from around the world who’d stop by to share ideas in sketch books, videos online and street art books. The highlight was getting to go out on the street with one of the artists as he did a piece. These guys loved what they were doing. Their energy and enthusiasm were infectious. As I left Brazil, the street art community that had embraced me and stirred my soul said “keep it going!”

When I returned to the States I decided to enlarge and start wheat pasting images from my 22 year archive of negatives along the roadside. I got a recipe for boiling wheat paste off the internet, talked with people at Kinko’s about how to make enlargements and away I went. My first forays were at night. I pasted onto roadside stands where people sell jewelry to tourists venturing to the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and Lake Powell. As I contemplated doing this, I had to consider how to introduce a new art form into a traditional culture. What imagery is acceptable? After stumbling a couple times, I settled on what I considered universally beloved Navajo themes – Code Talkers, sheep and elders.

One of my first pastings was of Navajo Code Talkers that I pasted onto an abandoned, deteriorating jewelry stand along the highway to Flagstaff.

I was shocked a week later as I drove by the stand to find people repairing it. Curious, I stopped to find out what was up. The guys working on the stand didn’t know I’d placed the Code Talker photo there. They said that so many tourists were stopping to photograph the stand, they decided to repair it and start using it again. I asked if I could take a photo as well and told them that I placed the image there. They responded by asking me to put something at the other end to stop traffic coming from that direction. This was my first validation from the community to continue pasting and it was my first insight into the potential of art to promote economic independence for the roadside vendors. More importantly, I appreciated the potential of this work serving as a tool to bridge cultures and races of people.

It is through these types of interactions with people as I’m installing art that I get to better know my community apart from the constrained interactions I have in the clinic. Installing art in communities on the reservation where people don’t know I’m a doctor who has been here for 26 years and that I have a sixteen year old 1/2 Navajo son, I defend what I’m doing by telling people that my project is a mirror reflecting back to the community the beauty they’ve shared with me over the past quarter century. It’s my hope that a stronger sense of self and collective identity is nurtured through the images which thereby strengthens the community.

Last summer I decided to pursue a dream suggested by a fellow street artist to invite some of my favorite artists out to the reservation to paint murals and to work with local youth. I called this experience The Painted Desert Project.

The Painted Desert Project

The Painted Desert Project hates stereotypes, respects the unique culture in which it operates and spreads love.

Before the first group of artists came out last summer to paint murals (which included Gaia, Labrona, Overunder, Doodles, Tom Greyeyes and Thomas “Breeze” Marcus), I sent to the non Native American artists copies of a book chapter on the Navajo creation story, a book of images and observations about the land and the people, a beaded item from one of the roadside stands and a film (“Broken Rainbow”), in an effort to sensitize the artists to the different world view here. I attempted to pair artists with various roadside stand owners and arranged for sweats with tribal elders to bless our efforts and to give the artists an idea of acceptable imagery and Navajo taboos.

It’s important to me that artists come to the project without preconceived ideas of what they’re going to paint. It’s important that they have enough time to interact with community members and spend time in this land of enormous skies and stunning landscapes then create work that reflects this interplay of cultures and landscape. In this way, the art is responsive to the moment like jazz. My hope is that the artist leaves enlightened and that the community feels enriched or vice versa.

Gaia saying goodbye to Matilda + her son, Tony

Last summer as the first group of artists was preparing to leave, we did something I’d never done in my long tenure here. We invited members from the community to my house to share a dinner with the artists. It was a simple meal shared around a candlelight lit table outdoors under the stars. How can this type of rich exchange not inform my medical practice which like my art practice attempts to heal and spread love?

My hope for the project this year is to not only share art but to do community service projects. For example, last summer Doodles painted a killer mural on a nearby food stand which burned down last fall. I’d very much like to get him back this summer to help the vendor rebuild the stand and then repaint it.

So when mofos ask me what’s up? What’s an old black doctor man doing wheat pasting on the Navajo nation? I tell them like the brothers told me in Brazil. I’m just trying to keep a good feeling going round and around.

- Jetsonorama

Photos by Jetsonorama

Photo by HENSE

Over the past month, Hense has been in Lima, Peru painting this massive mural. The following is a recap of the events courtesy of Hense:

We just finished up a large exterior installation in Lima, Peru. This is my tallest work to date measuring 137 feet tall and 170 feet wide. The project was organized by Morbo Gallery and funded by the ISIL Institute in MiraFlores, Lima.

I worked with my head assistant and a crew of 10 professional painters over the course of a month to complete the work.

With all my exterior projects, I rarely use a preconceived sketch or concept to go off of. In this case, I presented a few rough concepts to the school to express my vision for the building. However, I always like to leave some room for creative freedom and spontaneity while working. This project was challenging because of the scale. Every shape and mark that we made on the wall had to be massive to be seen from a great distance. I also wanted to leave smaller, details that would be seen by viewers close to the work. In this case most of my painting crew were local to Lima and spoke little to no English and I speak very little Spanish so it was challenging to communicate with them in the beginning of the project. After a month of working everyday with them we managed to be able to understand each other. I’m very grateful for that experience and I learned a lot from them and hope that they were inspired in some way by assisting in the process of the artwork.

Photo by Gino Moreno

We used over 200 gallons of exterior latex paint and a small amount of aerosol on this work. Most of the tools we used were rollers of various sizes, a paint sprayer, brushes, and homemade tools. One thing I feel is important when working on this scale is the improvisational use of tools to create the marks and shapes. In order to reach heights and lengths I had to attach brushes to extension poles to paint in hard to reach areas. We used strings and ropes to create circles and lines that needed to be accurate. However, most gestures and shapes were created freehand. I always push to keep a loose, painterly feel at a large scale. All my work is purely abstract and non representational.

Photo by HENSE

These works are inspired by the architecture and context of the structure. In this case I wanted to use very bright colors that would pop against the sky and next to other near by architecture in Lima. This piece has many layers in it. some of which we covered completely. It’s important to me that the work has a very layered and built up look. I’m never afraid to destroy the image at any given time if it means I have to in order to achieve progression in the work.

Photo by Christian Rinke

I’m always wanting to challenge myself and the viewer in regards to painting and what that can be.

Special thanks to: Jules Bay, Taylor Means, Morbo Gallery, ISIL Institute, Luar Zeid, Panorama, Angel, Paul, Pedro, Alex, Miguel, Jaime, Mayo, William, Christian Rinke, Gino Moreno, Os Villavicencio, Carlos Benvenuto, Candice House, Elard Robles. For all the hard work and making this project come to fruition.

Photo by Gino Moreno

Photos by HENSE, Gino Moreno and Christian Rinke

Hense has been committed to growing as an artist for nearly two decades now. The Atlanta native sticks to his guns by constantly showing support and advocating for the art scene in Atlanta. He’s done murals for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Museum of Design Atlanta, and recently transformed a historic church in Washington DC into a colorful, multi-surfaced piece of public art. Hense has exhibited his work nationally and internationally in solo and group shows, and has a long list of public art projects, commissions and collections. His abstract paintings and murals can blend precise line work with bright colors, shapes, and gestures.

Nico Glaude: Let’s kick things off with the church you painted in Washington. First of all, congrats on the massive amounts of attention that the project got on blogs and art sites, well deserved. If you can just talk about how that project came to being and your overall experience painting such a historic piece of architecture?

Hense: The project in Washington DC was probably the most interesting structure I’ve ever painted. I worked with a small crew to complete it. The project was a private commission which was located in SW Washington DC across the street from the Rubell’s proposed Contemporary Art Museum. The area in DC is a part of town that has huge potential to be the next art district and this project is the first step in bringing some life and color into the area. Taking an existing object like the church and painting the entire thing recontextualizes it and makes it a sculptural object. We really wanted to turn the church into a three-dimensional piece of artwork. With projects like this one, we really try to use the existing architecture as inspiration for the direction of the painting. I did several concept drawings for the church to present to the owner as rough ideas of aesthetic direction. I knew that visually, I wanted it to be drastically different from what it looked like before painting it. I also wanted to use very bright and bold colors to catch a viewers attention from far away. Most of my works are done in layers. The first step was to just get paint and color on every side and surface of the building. We then started developing large shapes and marks that would takes days to paint. The entire process took several weeks of layering and working. I’m very happy with the outcome of this project. I really enjoyed working on such interesting architecture. I also love working large and with multiple surface changes. When I’m working in my studio I usually am starting with a blank piece of paper, canvas or wood, and with projects like these I’m starting with an already beautiful piece of architecture to add color to.

Historic church in Washington DC

NG: Moving on to another mural you made for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. This mural is a complete departure from your most recent work; it’s a call back to letterform, minimalistic, comprised of only two colors and we get to see your name painted across a building. What was the inspiration behind the piece and why such a drastic change in style compared to previous murals?

Hense: I actually had another piece on the Center prior to this one and felt like it was time for an update. We were working on another exterior project right down the street for the Westside Cultural Arts Center which was very colourful and decided to do something totally opposite of that. I enjoyed taking it back to the pure essence of getting up. Silver and black, drippy block letters.

Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center

NG: Your murals always tend to be vast in terms of scale, and covered with a wide range of colors and shapes. What’s approach to doing a mural?

Hense: It really depends on the project. Right now I’m very influenced by interesting architecture. That could mean historic or contemporary. I enjoy working on flat surfaces of course, but a structure that has multiple planes and angles is much more dynamic visually before any paint is applied. It’s like having a blank canvas that is already layered and ready to go. Depending on the scale, I may have assistants work with me on projects.

Almost everything I work on is completely spontaneous and I rarely use a preconceived sketch or concept. I’ve been recently experimenting in treating my exterior works similarly to my paintings. Color is another important aspect of my work. I like to use bold, bright colors that make a statement and really pop.

The work is purely based on abstraction and the physical process of painting. I want to constantly push myself and the viewer as to what can be defined as a painting. I enjoy the experimental process of painting in my studio or outdoors and I never want to know ahead of time what the final outcome of the piece will be. For me, the exciting part of the creative process is the unknown and the experimenting that takes place to get from one stage to the other.

I worked large early on with my letter-based graffiti, so painting entire buildings was a natural progression. I used to write my name in big block letters 100 feet long and 50 feet high using silver and black oil-based paint. I think that has helped me understand how to execute large exterior works which can also have multiple surface changes. Working large for me is the best. As much as I enjoy painting in my studio, I can easily say that working on large exterior projects has been the most exciting. One of the major challenges of working on that scale is the material application to the surface. We need lots of tools and lots of paint. The marks and shapes need to be larger than most studio tools can make which means we have to invent new tools or methods for the particular project.

NG: The great debate of graffiti writers moving into gallery settings will always be contested, but it’s something that’s becoming the norm of late. How was your transition from the streets to the gallery and any advice for artists trying to make that same switch?

Hense: I would say to do what feels right, go your own route and be original.

NG: You’ve traveled a lot in the past because of your work. What is it that draws you to, and keeps you in Atlanta?

Hense: I enjoy Atlanta for many reasons. I think I’ve kept Atlanta as my home base because it allows me to grow as an artist and lets me hold down an affordable, nice studio.

I’m able to travel for projects whenever I need to and the City still has a great sense of originality and culture.

NG: So there’s the story of you getting booked bare foot while on the run from the cops, any other interesting stories that have happened to you whilst getting up?

Hense: That story your referring to is probably the most ridiculous of them. I’ve had my share of chases, bookings and incidents.

NG: What’s your favourite kind of spray paint to use?

Hense: I like them all.

NG: Do you have an all time favourite mural you’ve made?

Hense:

700 Delaware
2012
Washington DC
House paint and aerosol

NG: Toss up between a blank canvas and a blank wall, which would you pick?

Hense: Blank wall.

Photos courtesy of Hense