Graffiti in NYC

 

“New York is one of the ugliest cities in the world,” declares Hugo Martinez in the no-nonsense, self-assured drawl so characteristic of the Capital of the World. “It’s a cacophony of fourth-rate architecture, all mixed up. It doesn’t have any grand buildings. What gives the city character is the immense fight between the classes – you can’t picture NYC without graf in the background.”

 

Contentious words guaranteed to strike a chord with some and a nerve with many, not least Lieutenant Mona of the dramatically-titled Anti-Graffiti Task Force. Spearheading the city’s zero-tolerance initiative – including a dedicated 311 graffiti-reporting hotline, although work in progress merits a 911 call – Mona’s official line is one of rigid condemnation. “I refer to them as vandals, because that is what they are. Make no mistake, they are not artists. Vandals are not interested in artistic expression, or social commentary, all they care about is getting their ‘ups’ all over the city.”

 

It’s statement that Martinez dismisses as “moronic” – although he doesn’t deny the core accusation. “Why can’t an artist be a vandal?” he counters. “I don’t trust art that’s legal. The world is fucked up – art is institutionalised if it’s legal. Art has to change something.” Dismissing the vast majority of the world’s graffiti as “bullshit”, Martinez argues that NYC remains the undisputed vanguard of the culture not only because the city gave birth to it, but because of the fiercely defiant attitude that still beats at its heart. He lists just four other cities worthy to share this kudos: Los Angeles, Rio, Sao Paulo and Mexico City.

 

Romanticising the situation a tad in favour of the underdog, it’s that age-old struggle between the trampled underprivileged and the ultra hard-line establishment – the former spraying their way back into public consciousness to re-appropriate a city that’s sold its soul to the high-rise fat cats; the latter scrubbing and scouring away their identities and clapping those “poor working-class schmucks” in the slammer.

 

But then battling the system’s no fun if the system rolls over and takes it. In January 2006, with the sale of aerosol paint to minors already prohibited – and merchants obliged to keep it locked away from potential shoplifters – Councilmember Peter Vallone, Jr. developed controversial legislation that would make it illegal for anyone under 21 to possess spray-paint or permanent markers. This sparked outrage from fashion mogul Marc Ecko, who sued Vallone and Mayor Bloomberg on behalf on art students everywhere. They backed down in May.

 

Bring it on, eggs Martinez. “Repression leads to aggression,” he asserts, exposing the core of any self-respecting class struggle. “Republicans are really good for graf – they believe in repression, and hard-line measures have made graffiti boom. Writers are inspired by being erased, and come up with quicker, more unusual ways to do it.”

 

“There are 11,000 train cars and 140,000 buildings in New York,” he goes on, clearly having done his research. And the advent of ‘the buff’ in the early ‘80s – a chemical wash that stripped the paint off trains every night – didn’t stamp out graf so much as fire it up further. “When they attacked the subway system and brought in graffiti-free trains, it moved onto the buildings,” he observes. “In the last twenty years, graf has blossomed again. Everyone’s killing the streets; they erase them much more often than the trains.”

 

Now in his mid-50s, Martinez has been immersed in the culture since his days as a philosophy student in 1972 – when he shuffled some Puerto Rican teenagers painting trains into a loose collective called United Graffiti Artists. Now, as part of his All City Project – the phrase ‘all city’ designating a writer with visible tags in all five boroughs – he’s invited an eclectic group of graf writers from teens to middle-age to spray their multicoloured mark all over the regulation décor of a low-income 1960s apartment.

 

And he has no qualms about sharing his views on the rest of the art world. “I didn’t want to turn it into a latrine for the wealthy, like every other gallery,” he scowls. “The art world is fifty people, and it represents their culture. Art’s a commodity.”

 

“There’s no such thing as a graf artist,” he continues, building up steam now. “That describes beautifying private property; figurative art. That’s not graffiti. It’s like Pat Boone is to rock ‘n’ roll – a dumbed-down version. A true graf writer will wait for a muralist, and then go over it. They have no love for private property – it’s more like punk rock. NYC is all about fighting and appropriation. Art doesn’t have to be legal – on some level, it’s all against one institution or another.”

 

© Nick Carson 2006. First published in Issue 5 of TEN4 magazine

 

Matt Robinson

“I like the idea of slipping between light and dark,” reflects Matt Robinson, flipping through his biro-scrawled sketchbook. “My work has a slightly violent undercurrent, dressed up in a nice, fancy pastel way. It has a playful flipside: at times soaring to dizzy heights, then crashing down into something extremely negative.”

Since being asked to copy a piece by Aubrey Beardsley in a GCSE art class, Matt has been hand-picking references and ideas from various artists’ work, sprinkling them over his own, and watching them sprout organically into something fresh and vibrant. His Fine Art BA helped to filter out the weaker ideas to leave something special: in his words, a “multi-referenced strange thing – a world within a world.” Monsterism meets landscapism, with a dash of Ren and Stimpy.

“Have you ever had a fever?” he begins, grasping at the nearest real-world experience to his trademark surrealism. “I had one in India. I got this strange feeling where I felt either massive or tiny and compact – almost a meditative space change within my own head. Sometimes it’s claustrophobic; sometimes you’re engulfed by too much space. But it’s always slightly warped – never a true angle of the narrative.”

This timeless struggle between real and unreal, dark and light, good and evil is integral to Matt’s work, where saccharine-sweet forest creatures and kitsch utopian ideals are often twisted and distorted to release grotesque, shadowy alter-egos. “I like the idea of something furry that you can go up and stroke, but if you get too close it’ll bite your head off,” he continues with a mischievous grin.

Recent sculptural experiments have involved hunting down the kind of ornamental tat normally reserved for grandma’s mantelpiece and fusing it together like a crazed vivisectionist. A row of pre-op critters fix us with chilling porcelain stares from a paint-spattered shelf, and I put it to Matt that they’re pretty sinister even before they reach his operating table. He smiles again. “Everything seems so perfect: a stream flows by as a couple stares into each others’ eyes. So I’m hacking them apart, reforming them into this horrible monster with a head growing out of its back.”

With the archetypal image of the wild-haired scientist screaming ‘what have I created?’ dancing in the forefront of my mind, I have to ask if after spilling the darker recesses of his imagination, Matt ever surprises or shocks himself. “The scared factor is buried in my unconscious,” he responds after a few seconds’ thought. “This brings it out, and I thrive on that – delving into the darkness, having a rummage around ‘til I find a gold nugget. There’s a certain amount of confrontation there. I’m going into this scary land that’s familiar: I’ve been scared there before, now I’m going back with knowledge.”

While molten polystyrene, expanding foam and plaster-filled condoms have all helped achieve the bizarre appeal of his 3D work, Matt still enjoys the challenge of attacking a blank canvas – although he’s yet to translate the nervous, stream-of-consciousness quality that gives his sketchbook scribbles such urgency. Turning to an acrylic piece on the wall, he highlights yet another tension of opposites: this time a bulbous growth swells through a crisp, angular architectural form: organic unpredictability tempered by man-made rigidity. “Here it looks like the fabric of the canvas has been pierced, and it’s pouring out,” he gestures. “It’s a fantasy world, a free play of ideas.”

© Nick Carson 2006. First published in Issue 4 of TEN4 magazine

Getting Sentimental

Midland-born artist George Shaw has attracted much critical acclaim for his brooding depictions of scenes from the Coventry council estate where he grew up, saturated with memory and intrigue. He talks to Nick Carson about nostalgia, profundity and an innovative use for Humbrol enamel paint.

James Joyce, George reminds me, once said that even in the most mundane, commonplace existence it’s possible to have the true nature of a thing revealed to you. A similar sense of gritty epiphany resonates from the otherwise mundane scenes from Tile Hill council estate that make up his latest collection, ‘What I Did Last Summer’. Painstakingly depicted using Humbrol paint – tiny tins normally associated with boyhood modelling kits – he describes his work simply as “thoughtful, quite naïve paintings of where I grew up.”

Re-living the boyhood dream

Modelling enamel is an unusual medium for a professional artist, but the childhood memories it evokes all add to the effect of Shaw’s work. “I have an affinity with it, and can control it,” he explains. “It’s shiny and quite seductive: it gets shinier and shinier as you build up the layers, like
a glossy magazine or a pebble underneath water. When you remove it from the water it’s just a pebble. And you’re always aware of the glossy surface even though there’s the illusion of 3D space, which appeals to me.”

Coming in such small containers, can the paint be economically viable for large-scale work? “It’s cheaper than the extraordinarily expensive oil paint you get from art shops, but it’s not rock bottom,” he admits. “But it’s important to me: the name ‘Humbrol’ sets off triggers that ‘enamel paint’ alone doesn’t.” In fact the brand has come to define him: searching for George Shaw on the Internet returns, unsurprisingly, reams of pages on George Bernard Shaw – but simply adding the word ‘Humbrol’ to the query makes all the difference.

Taking your time

The sheer amount of work that goes into a painting, George proposes, can help to encourage people’s appreciation of it. “When I started off all my work was extremely detailed, down to individual blades of grass and leaves on trees: I thought that was the best way to do it,” he reveals. “It always took a long time to paint – it took time and was about time. As with pre-Raphaelite paintings, if a lot of work has gone into it then it’s intriguing for people to think about what was going through the painter’s head for all that time.”

“Now I’m better at handling materials, and have learned to create the impression that I’ve painted every single detail, without actually doing it,” he continues. “I’m getting good at making the paint do what I want it to do, so my work is getting freer and bigger. But I don’t want to be too ambitious – you have to be in control of the materials and not let them control you,” he advises.

Describing the indescribable

Despite the meticulous levels of detail that characterise his paintings, George insists that in essence it’s the deeper, conceptual meaning that’s important. “For me, it’s more about conveying feelings than scenes: I would love to be abstract and avoid making pictures altogether,” he admits. “My work is realistic while conveying experiences that have nothing to do with the solidity of the object – evocative, poetic images. I try to use the visual world to describe something indescribable, when I haven’t the language to do it justice.”

He draws attention to the hauntingly beautiful landscapes of Casper David Freidrich, and insists that a picture of a council bus shelter can instil an emotional response as powerful as a view of the Austrian Alps – it’s all about the memories associated with it. “You can be hoodwinked into thinking you’re experiencing something profound just because you’re looking at something beautiful, but you need the power of insight,” he argues. “I rarely draw anything without an emotional involvement with it. Sometimes I see something beautiful, like mist covering a mountain or light reflecting off a lake, and I make a sketch – but to me this is little more than an exercise. It passes the time, but there isn’t the same depth of meaning.”

Sharing literary sentiments

Much of George’s inspiration comes from literature, including Joyce and writers as diverse as Samuel Beckett and DH Lawrence who, he suggests, share a common thread: “They all deal with early sensations in their work: the desire to be an artist or a writer when young,” he observes. “I want my paintings to tell the stories I haven’t the skill to tell through writing.”

“Beckett’s prose prompts you to leave the text – it triggers an emotive, sensory response, recalling memories in a dreamlike state,” he enthuses. “I rarely get this from paintings, only books.” Keen to provoke a similar effect with his art, Shaw self-consciously echoes literary techniques. “Part of the nature of a book is dealing with things in isolation; moving through time in pages and chapters,” he explains. “I try to make my paintings work like this – in series, like chapters in a book. Hopefully I’ll get to the end at some point, and look back on it as a journey; a pilgrimage.”

Doing it for yourself

After graduating from Sheffield Polytechnic in 1989, George immediately gave up trying to paint for a living and went into teaching. But, seven years later, a childhood urge to be an artist was reawakened and he took two years out to study for an MA at the Royal College in London. “It’s my personal project; I couldn’t care less about recognition,” he admits. “It’s lovely to make a living from it, but you have to be self-motivated by things close to you.”

“If it’s not coming from inside you it’s not art – it’s more like graphic design, and you’re working to a brief imposed on you by an outside culture,” he argues. “The most exciting art counters that: true artists have no choice, and the work is essential for them. For me, it would have been the same achievement if no one else had noticed: it’s a question of being honest with yourself about what you’re thinking and doing. Sometimes you’ll be in step with the world; sometimes not.”

Accessible nostalgia

The major problem to avoid when dredging up deeply personal imagery is the risk of isolating your audience – a concern of which George is only too aware. “If you’re too nostalgic you become like a bore in a pub talking about what chocolate bars used to be like,” he groans. And yet, paradoxically, a striking feature of his paintings is their generic appeal: although focussing almost exclusively on the council estate where the artist was raised, the distinct lack of any identifiable feature helps to ensure that the work remains accessible.

“I paint bits of rubbish, but I don’t hark back to things like old designs for Coke or Fanta cans,” George points out. “My paintings are evocative of mood, sensation and a general notion of time – the distance between yourself and your childhood. It’s not important to me how packaging design has changed: people want to be able to connect with things, and if you’re too personal then you can lock people out,” he warns. “You don’t have to know my story to step into the nature of my work: it’s not too parochial. Although it depicts the English working class, it’s a human reading of it. The most successful paintings look out, not in: these are like me, as a kid, looking out at the world.”

© Nick Carson 2004. First published on Channel 4’s IDEASFACTORY West Midlands

Shades of War

Many artists advocate a direct response approach, but landscape painter Rob Perry has turned it into an extreme sport. Nick Carson meets a man willing to risk frostbite and being crushed deep underground, whose powerful war paintings resonate from the front lines of the past and carry the chilling echoes of trench warfare firmly into the present.

Suffering from chilblains in a freezing trench would put most people off their cornflakes, but plunging into the gloom of characterless, endlessly winding underground bunkers is downright dangerous and pretty foolish, especially alone and with no record of where you are. But Rob Perry remains determined to capture these scenes en situ, and his haunting charcoal-and-gouache drawings hail from the depths of another world.

“The tunnels at Vauquois are very eerie,” he admits. “It’s an absolute labyrinth. You come to a fork and there are two absolutely characterless tunnels, you go down one and come to another junction. It starts to get quite frightening, but you have to shrug off the claustrophobia and get on with your drawing. Eventually you get so focussed on what you’re doing that you stop worrying about the possible roof falls.”

Although having no direct experience of war himself, Rob is overtly political and frequently emphasises his support of Amnesty International and his disgust with war in general, which he says fuels his fascination with the subject. From an early age family members involved with both the First and Second World War had shared their reminiscences. “I was always aware of the nature of war, and appalled by it.”

Going Nocturnal

Rob had already developed a flair for working in low-light conditions, which transferred well into the pitch-black chasms of war-torn France. “It’s amazing how your eye will acclimatise,” he points out. “To work down in the tunnels I take a paraffin lamp which illuminates the object and a small strip lamp which fits on the front of my helmet, which gives a spread of light rather than a focussed beam.”

Choosing to work through the night rather than add to his hectic daily commitments, he began with dimly-lit street scenes around his neighbourhood in Stourbridge. “As a single parent I had a full-time job with three children, and did night-school as well,” Rob recalls. “I had no time to work, but had to find a way of producing paintings. So I put a light in the back of my van and started to work at night.”

Dubbed his ‘mobile studio’, his trusty van also has a huge easel structure mounted on its side, and a roof-mounted rig that extends up to twenty feet in the air, engineered in his garage. It also doubles as a somewhat un-luxurious, unheated residence for months on end out in the field.

Let There be Light

The major time constraint on landscape painting has always been the inherent inconstancy of natural light. So presumably creating a perfectly controlled, consistently lamp-lit environment in otherwise pitch blackness allow for a different style of work?

“Well, yes, until you fall asleep, fall off your stool or become unconscious with the cold,” laughs Rob. “It is a slightly more stable situation, but of course at night it is colder.” He should know: In winter 2000 he spent two months living in his van amongst the Somme battlefields, working deep into the night.

Unsurprisingly, this dedication to his ‘direct experience’ philosophy is not without consequences. Unable to paint wearing gloves, his hands eventually became shrivelled into paws by advanced chilblains, which left his knuckles cracked and bleeding. The solution: Grit your teeth, and carry on.

Ripples through History

“I call nearly all my exhibitions Echoes of War; echoes through time rather than through the atmosphere,” Rob reveals. “As wars go further and further into the past, their echoes gradually become fainter and fainter. The trenches slowly erode, the ivy grows over the blockhouses, and Nature takes over the battlefield.”

 Working alone at night in environments soaked with death and suffering, these time echoes combine with the bitter cold to promise an all-round chilling experience. “It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” he confesses. “Auschwitz was sobering and grim, as are a lot of the First World War battlefields; particularly Verdun. Remains all over the place.”

Organic Monstrosities

Some of Rob’s war paintings resemble hideous growths sprouting from an otherwise serene landscape; a gnarled and twisted memento of a war long-past. But while his technique sometimes borders on the abstract, it’s invariably grounded to some extent in the scene in front of him.

Broad illustrations of the nature of war are not his speciality; rather he depicts the ways in which conflict tears and craters the natural landscape for years to come. “When I look at a landscape, half of me wants to record it just as it is, in which case you might as well take a photograph,” Rob admits. “The other half wants to reinterpret it, because I physically enjoy manipulating paint.”

The Joy of Paint

“Big and small strokes, coarse and fine brushes, using a very thick consistency, putting it on with a palette knife or thinning it down with turps, you know, and spattering it on, and seeing how the paint can dribble; there’s wonderful effects you can get,” he enthuses. “It’s magical just to mess about with paint. So that’s what I do; go out and look at a landscape, and that becomes the vehicle through which I mess about with paint.”

“I think to myself, ‘I’ve got four hours to do this,’ and I have to simplify everything. Analyse the colours and basic composition, block out the light and dark areas, and express the texture of distant woodland in a few brush strokes, or smears, or spatters.”

“You have to develop a kind of visual shorthand; and all artists go through this,” he goes on. “If you look at an early Rembrandt, he works in the most immaculate detail on long, time-consuming pieces. But as an old man he’s such an expert in using paint that he can say in ten brush strokes what would have taken a hundred before.”

Music to your Brush
 
Rob’s distinctive style combines broad, coarse brush strokes sweeping over knolls and stumps with areas of tiny, airbrushed detail, a technique he likens to composing classical music. “You get quiet bits and slow bits with just woodwind and a little bit of strings; then it builds up to a crescendo, the tempo increases and suddenly you’ve got brass and percussion.”

“It’s got different textures, and a visual composition is the same: You’ve got large, broad, open areas and then very, very complex bits; the focal points,” he explains. “I used to say to my students that a piece of music with exactly the same tempo and mix of instruments throughout would be totally repetitive and boring.”

“But many people like club music; in the same way you can have totally unfocused visual compositions, like Jackson Pollock’s work. It’s a total scramble of shapes, colours, dots, spatters; there’s no focal point, and it’s very even. But it can be very, very beautiful, like woven cloth.”

A Visual Narrative

An active member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA), Rob often hires out entire exhibitions of his work, and gives historical lectures to schools and colleges. As such he is often very reluctant to sell individual works that form part of a series.

“I relate it to being a novelist: It’s like someone saying, ‘I really like chapter three, can I buy that?’ or, ‘Page ninety-seven is incredible, what about that?’ You know; it’s part of a novel. In a way, my art is a bit like that. Mind you, if someone wanted to buy the whole package of the Maginot Line, I’d probably sell it – if they offered me enough,” he smiles.

© Nick Carson 2004. First published on Channel 4’s IDEASFACTORY West Midlands

Marking Your Territory

Nick Carson meets an artist bringing graffiti into the mainstream in Britain, and finds that everything he sprays turns to gold.

Graffiti: writing or pictures scribbled, scratched, or sprayed illicitly on a wall or other surface in a public place. The dictionary barely disguises its contempt for what is now gaining recognition as a remarkably creative art form: one that is struggling to keep afloat on a sea of distrust in the legitimate art world.

Street graffiti defacing public property remains justifiably illegal, but its unique style and exploration of an often-neglected medium – the humble aerosol can – is just beginning to scratch its fair share of respect. No small thanks are due to the phenomenal success of Arron Bird, a.k.a. Temper: the first British graffiti artist ever to be granted a solo exhibition, he has whipped up a storm in the contemporary art business.

Picture an eleven-year-old balancing on milk crates in the dead of night, adding the final touches to his first illegal masterpiece on the streets of Wolverhampton. Twenty-two years later, that very same individual has celebrities falling over themselves to get their hands on his work and has been well paid to spray his mark onto the likes of Saatchi & Saatchi and Coca-Cola.

Life’s too short

Chiselling a professional niche for such a frowned-upon activity seems challenging enough, but Arron also had to pull at the restraints of a working-class background, which continually threw up yet more hurdles. On the plus side, such social pressures have bred a pragmatism that has kept his feet firmly on the ground throughout his dizzying ascent to recognition: “It’s always hard to make a decent living from art, and graffiti is still not viewed as an art form. Naturally it was a hard decision to make to go into it professionally.” Conscious that all fame is fleeting, he still funnels all of his profits into a trust fund for his children.

Having been a gravedigger and a forklift truck driver, it seems a colossal task to have started painting for a living with no formal training whatsoever. Nevertheless natural talent seemed irrepressible even in the warehouse: Arron spent most of his time drawing on the boxes. “Too many people were telling me I should do something with my art,” he recalls, “but I never believed I was as good as people said.” Ironically it took a tragedy to jump-start his ambition: “Nine members of my family died in the same year. It all came at once, but it made me realise that life’s too short to be doing something you don’t want to do.”

Shades of perfectionism

This philosophy is brought home in Temper’s collection ‘The Good Die Young’, a series of portraits capturing twenty-seven iconic figures that, in his view, had a premature end to their sparkling careers. Sprayed freehand with a standard aerosol can – as with all of his work – the pieces demonstrate an incredible attention to detail that bears testament to the dedication, tenacity and unshakable pride in his work that have been at the root of the artist’s success in a previously non-existent market.

Even as an eleven-year-old experimenting with aerosols on buses and derelict buildings, the perfectionism that has made the industry prick up their ears and take notice shone through. “I’ve always put a lot of shading into my work, even in the eighties when flat colours were everywhere. I wasn’t satisfied with cartoon-style graphics: I wanted realism.”

Soaking up life

Artistic inspiration often comes from the most unexpected of sources, and graffiti art is no exception. “Something as mad as a door handle might inspire a different kind of letter form. You have to absorb life,” Temper elaborates, and when inspiration strikes its sense of urgency is unmistakable: “I feel it in my chest like a punch, then I have to paint it.”

Keen to keep his work fresh, original and from the heart, he steers well clear of extensive, self-conscious research into historical movements and great artists of the past. “I haven’t been trained in a certain style and I don’t want all of my paintings to look the same; it would stifle my creativity. If other people’s work goes in, develops and comes out in a different format five years down the line then that’s great, but you should never be too influenced by other artists. You need to do your own thing.”

Raw human instinct

Graffiti is widely equated with vandalism, but Arron turns a blind eye to such accusations. “At the end of the day the biggest company in the world [Coca-Cola] employed a graffiti artist to re-design their brand. Everyone’s got a comment about something they don’t understand. I haven’t always been as responsible as I am today but I was never out to upset or threaten people: I just wanted to paint pictures.”

Humans have been scratching marks on walls since the Stone Age, and Temper – while wary of condoning mindless defacement – links the urban art’s huge popularity with a deep human urge to express oneself. “Put a piece of paper and a crayon in front of a toddler and what’s the first thing he’ll do? Go and draw on the wall. With today’s laws things become more complicated, but people need to understand that it’s a natural instinct. I wouldn’t be here if I had never painted buses and walls in the middle of the night.” Some graffitists, Arron acknowledges, will intentionally vandalise public places. But tarring with the same brush allows no room for diversity: as he puts it, “graffiti isn’t an artistic movement, it’s a part of street culture. We don’t all think alike.”

Breaking into the market

So, the trail is blazing: what will it take for others to follow in Temper’s footsteps? Firstly, it’s not as easy as he’s made it look. “Kids are getting into it now because they see my success and think, ‘I can do that.’ Graffiti is as natural as drinking water to me, but I’ve spent ten years making a gap in the market for myself. I don’t think many people realise the amount of time and commitment I’ve put in.”

Only given time, it seems, can the niche swell to accommodate more talented youngsters in the future. “There’s no market for widespread graffiti art yet: it’s a very specialised thing, and one artist can’t make a market. I’ve never questioned the culture behind it, but it’ll take a good ten or fifteen years before it’s publicly understood. Hopefully I’ll still be around then to make sure it all goes smoothly.”

© Nick Carson 2003. First published on Channel 4’s IDEASFACTORY West Midlands

The Third Dimension

Blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, Midlands-based artist Chu has introduced a new string to the bow of contemporary graffiti by taking it into three dimensions. Nick Carson dons some 3D goggles to investigate this new phenomenon.

“When I finished my first 3D painting, I put on the glasses and burst into tears,” Chu confesses. Simply by spraying two versions of a painting slightly offset – one in red, the other in blue – he had created an image that, through standard 3D goggles, jumped right off the canvas. “It’s a maths thing: I can paint them without wearing the glasses,” he continues. “I guess I’m a frustrated mathematician – too lazy to do anything with it except paint.”

Inspiration, he explains, comes from daily life, socialising, and a bit of pain: this all seems simple enough, but his work is nonetheless groundbreaking. “I’ve only ever heard of one other stereoscopic painter, and that’s some guy in Florida,” he tells me. But Chu’s efforts at distorting perspective don’t stop there: he is also in the illusionary business of making corners and ceilings disappear – again, armed only with an aerosol can.

Playing tricks on the mind

“It’s a facet of my mathematical ways,” he chuckles: “it’s all based on your point-of-view. By continuing a line up a wall onto the ceiling you can delete corners and make the ceiling disappear, depending on where you’re standing.” Unlike fellow Midlander Temper, Chu has never been into portraits: “I don’t paint faces but places: my pulses are beams, not beans. My work is complicated because I want it to be,” he explains. “I suppose I’m a mathematician at heart, but my heart’s not in mathematics.”

A recent project was a large-scale mural covering the outside of a gift shop at the bottom of Snowdon. Chu’s new ‘psychedelic bomb’ measures an impressive 70×20ft, covering three walls of the building and making both front corners vanish. This particular job also demonstrates the importance of good networking: when Chu met and played pool with the current owners of the shop in London, he showed them his work and was told that when they owned a gift shop in Wales, they wanted him to paint it. They kept their word.

Freestyle improvisation

Surely this kind of work requires expensive specialist materials? Not a bit of it. “There are lots of paints made specifically for graffiti art, but it’s all the same at the end of the day,” Chu proposes. “I use off-the-shelf British car paint: there may be more executive toys for custom-made paints, like nozzles, thousands of colours and other tricks, but this doesn’t mean there are any new ideas.”

Working large-scale and freestyle, all of Chu’s 3D paintings are done on the spur of the moment to keep a sense of immediacy. “Graffiti style is all about improvisation: this kind of technique is sympathetic to what I’m applying it to,” he reveals. “When it’s asked of you, you have to paint, produce and dazzle.”

Spreading the word

Creative flair will drive your work forward but, Chu insists, getting noticed in the legitimate graffiti market is little different from the illegal underground scene: you still have to spray your tag everywhere. “You see remnants of the old New York alter-egos – streaming through suburban landscapes. Just a name, scrawled by people who want to be bigger than they really are,” he points out.

But, Chu argues, even this has its place. “It’s cheeky nuisance material but they’re shouting their presence, which is as necessary here as with specially crafted works like mine. It’s all about exposure and self-publicity: if you don’t get paid well, make sure your name is all over it,” he advises. “Shout about what you do. Brand yourself, and maintain your own identity even when working for large companies.”

Starting young

From the age of eleven, Chu took to the streets of Walsall with cans of aerosol paint. “It’s fast, permanent and easy to buy,” he points out. “Longevity can depend on kudos, permanence or both: ideally you want a piece to survive on its kudos, but the more durable the paint the better.” Crucial to achieving recognition is a fresh sense of originality: “A good piece of graffiti is one that ignores graffiti,” he argues. “It can incorporate any visual style: you’re not limited to one particular medium any more than a portrait painter is.”

After enrolling in a BTEC National Diploma in Graphic Design at Walsall College of Art, Chu dropped out after a year. “I was an active graffiti artist at the time, which steered me away from curriculum activity,” he recalls. “I was heading towards disaster; then I got involved with Walsall Youth Arts.” Through this he established the area’s first legal paint site, and ran twice-weekly workshops. Promoting the ‘Graffiti Bastards’ exhibition at the Custard Factory helped to get his work noticed, and he was soon on the way to going freelance. By 1996 he was concentrating entirely on individual work, including the widely successful ‘Your Mum Rang’ sticker campaign.

Rising from the ashes

“This region has some of the most creative people in the world,” Chu argues, “but what can poison us – and has in the past – is a yearning to manufacture so much in so little a time if demand outgrows supply. You can lose your mind easily in a place that used to deliver nails along the canal. It’s an eye-opener, not an ego-booster: I get thorough inspiration surrounded by what has existed, but only through effort now and today can we re-create the throbbing heartland of one of the most industrious places on the planet.”

“The West Midlands never had an artistic reputation, and was often mocked by the likes of Manchester, Edinburgh and London,” he continues, “but we’ve now come to a position to be reckoned with.” And graffiti, he insists, has already tapped the mainstream market: “If you choose to excel in any field – not only in your own eyes, but also in the eyes of the viewing public – then undoubtedly your craft will be desirable. There are only three golden rules to being a graffiti artist: style, placement and survival.”

© Nick Carson 2003. First published on Channel 4’s IDEASFACTORY West Midlands

Outroduction

Breaking on lino in the dead of night. Spraying the final touches to an outline, beads of sweat prickling as a siren draws nearer. MCs battling it out in a sweaty underground venue to a baying crowd. All of these things are alien to me: they’re not my background; they’re not my culture, and having known Temper for two years I’m still scratching the surface of what fuels his compulsive creativity.

But I think he’s enjoyed such phenomenal success partly because his journey is a universal one. He’s changing the face of the culture that made him, not simply by exposing high-quality graffiti to the public – and by playing with the context in which we view it – but also because he justifies his work as an expression of his soul. In his words, ‘I don’t spray paint, I spray me.’

When I first met Arron back in 2003, he told me that inspiration hits him in the chest like a punch. It’s that primal need to pour the contents of his head onto canvas that makes him an artist – in that respect, the fact that he uses a spray can is circumstantial. But it’s also deeply relevant, because when Temper became the ‘face of graffiti’ after putting his mark on Sprite he gave a glimpse of what drives some illegal writers too. Sometimes it’s mindless defacement of public property; that’s why it’s illegal. Sometimes it’s about expressing yourself in the rawest possible form, making your mark on the world.

Temper remains fiercely true to his roots, openly disregards artistic pretension and superficial society, and keeps to a small circle of trusted friends. Working deep into the night in a sleep-deprived haze, aerosols rattling around in his cavernous studio, it must be a lonely process at times – and it’s obvious from the sparkle in his eye when discussing his fans that their personal feedback means the world to him. But what strikes me most is the creativity boiling over the surface; the number of collections stored up in his mind and ready to rush out when the dam breaks. Somehow, when Temper tells you he can paint every day until he dies and still have more to come, you’re compelled to believe him.

Hip-hop culture is all about stepping up your game, and the future can only be a global one – but hoisting himself up from nothing has seared the need for a rock-solid grounding in every aspect of Arron’s life. He’s got a lot of canvases to paint, and prefers to build a tower to the stars than shoot a rocket that soon comes plummeting down. Right now, he’s still digging the foundations: to steal the artist’s own metaphor, this book marks a full-stop at the end of the first paragraph in his artistic career. The way he talks about the next five years is enough to make anyone tingle with anticipation. Now is the calm before the storm; the slow-motion leap before the fight begins. It’s safe to say that Temper will be around for many years to come.

© Nick Carson 2005. Part of Temper’s limited edition portfolio, published by Temper BMC Ltd

Move Collection

‘I didn’t want to see faces; I didn’t want to see limbs. I wanted them to look awkward. That awkwardness is what I call reality, as an artist. When you watch someone do a backspin you don’t see their feet, you don’t see their face, you do not see their features – and that’s the purest essence. Painting breakers static isn’t reality. What makes you excited about breaking is the speed of it; the not seeing. If I see somebody doing a windmill, the faster the windmill is the more excited I am. I wanted to capture that on canvas.’

Move’s apparent unreality stems from this quest for realism, based on lightning-quick charcoal sketches of breakers, djs and sportsmen invited to perform in Temper’s studio. But as a result, it’s not an easy collection to have on your wall. ‘You look at it and it feels like it’s shaking; it’s going to give you a headache,’ he observes. ‘But if art was always about playing it safe – doing collections because they sit right – I wouldn’t be an artist.’

‘This isn’t a natural way to paint. I think that’s why nobody’s painted like this, or probably will for a long time. It’s not a style that comes comfortably: you have to look at everything in double vision. You know there should be a leg there, or a foot there, but you’ve got to ignore it. You’re working in blurs – it doesn’t look right, but it’s not supposed to. If you watch something move and then stop it, the honesty of that stop is what I’ve painted.’

Wordplay in the lengthy title of each piece acknowledges landmark names in the history of the culture: ‘The Tables Turned for Hercules’ is a respectful nod to Godfather of hip-hop Kool Herc, while ‘Charlie Chased Them Through the Short Cut to Islamic Africa’ flags up pioneering djs Charlie Chase, DJ Shortkut and African Islam. There’s reference to Harlem Globetrotters’ founder Abe Saperstein, renowned breaking crew Street Machine and Bubbles, the UK’s first female breaker.

Keen to get the entire subject out of his head and onto canvas once and for all, Temper poured out this pioneering 50-piece collection in just a month. ‘I can get someone to quote this: I did not sleep for four weeks. Literally didn’t sleep. A few power naps. To be truthful, after I’d done the collection, I collapsed in exhaustion. But I enjoyed it.’

© Nick Carson 2005. Part of Temper’s limited edition portfolio, published by Temper BMC Ltd

Too Good to Die Young

The Good Die Young drained the life from 27 colourful characters. For Temper, the next stage of his bereavement process was to splash it back in glorious celebration of what made them iconic in the first place.

‘When I lost my Granddad I was very, very angry,’ is his example. ‘But when you come out of that place you start thinking about the good times you’ve had; his personality. I celebrate his life in my mind – the perfect image of him. That’s what I wanted to do with Too Good to Die Young.’

Of course, a full-colour portrait using freehand aerosol is in a completely different league to greyscale. ‘Technically it was something I had to prepare myself for,’ he says. ‘If it were that easy, everybody would be doing it. It’s got to look realistic. Comfortable.’

Some of the earlier black-and-white portraits certainly have a cold intensity that makes you shift in your seat. ‘Hendrix in The Good Die Young is looking at you straight on. It’s almost like a stencil. His eyes are staring; he looks like he’s in the wrong place, like he didn’t want to die like that.’

‘With this collection I wanted to remember him in the sense of his life; that perfect image of him. And the only thing you can do with Hendrix is put a guitar in his hand and put him on stage, pulling that face he pulls when he’s feeling what he’s doing. That’s a celebration of his life.’

Judging by the overwhelmingly positive feedback from diehard aficionados, the essence of these great legends courses through the fibres of each canvas. ‘Every single one has its own community of fans. I could start a fan club for each painting, and that’s going to be one of the highlights: true fans saying there’s something more than just the painting there.’

Seven pieces took nine months to complete, and it was emotionally draining as well as technically challenging. Contrary to popular belief, it’s still not finished. ‘I actually stopped, because it started working in reverse,’ admits Temper. ‘Instead of being more comfortable with my bereavement, I opened up old wounds. I’ll go back to it again when I feel emotionally prepared.’

© Nick Carson 2005. Part of Temper’s limited edition portfolio, published by Temper BMC Ltd

Saatchi & Saatchi

‘I’d been speaking to a guy called Chris while preparing the Minuteman show,’ begins Temper. ‘He had an office in London he wanted me to paint. Lovely guy. He was very creative – I knew that – but I didn’t know he was a Creative Director.’ When an opening finally came up, the two arranged a date and the company’s name was revealed. ‘But I didn’t know who Saatchi & Saatchi were,’ he grins. ‘Totally alien world to me. Even when my manager showed me what they’d done, I kept it on the level of me doing something for Chris. It’s the sort of job you could get quite nervous about.’

Saatchi’s Creative Team felt their surroundings had grown stale. Temper’s open brief was to inspire them, and he had a weekend to do it. ‘Chris wanted to surprise them, so I started at 7pm on Friday and went straight through to 8am on Monday. I had two or three 45-minute sleeps, but apart from that I was painting non-stop. There were coffee machines everywhere; that’s what kept me going.’

The result is nothing short of a 45-foot-long masterpiece. ‘I wanted to link the word ‘Creative’ with the word ‘Temper’ and I thought, we both look for a reaction in what we do. That was the middle word. So the piece actually spells out ‘Reaction’, with the ‘o’ giving birth to little Trobots – representational drawings of my ideas.’ Beginning with the artist running to London with spray cans in his hands, it then launches into a multicoloured explosion of creative symbolism.

There’s a character standing in a whirlpool, holding his brain while electric sparks pulse from it. A crossroads, one route drooping to represent ideas with no mileage. But those ideas, instead of being scrunched up and binned, become a paper aeroplane that flies into the artist’s temple: ‘Even my wasted ideas are ideas,’ he says simply. A thick white border frames the work top and bottom but it bursts over the threshold in places, not to be boxed in by anyone.

Delighted with the result, Saatchi dubbed him an ‘aerosolic visionary’ and invited him back to paint the office next-door. This time he had just seven hours to spare, no large area of wall space and no clear concept in mind – his only brief was to keep to the walls. So he freestyled all over the carpet, the ceiling and the sofas. ‘They’re creative people, and they trust me making a creative decision,’ he reasons. ‘I wanted it to feel as if somebody had just come in with a couple of cans and gone bang, bang, bang. It worked really well, but was nothing like the first one.’

© Nick Carson 2005. Part of Temper’s limited edition portfolio, published by Temper BMC Ltd