PLAY!

"Scoundrel, thief, trespasser, go home white boy, you´re not welcome here."

Blending in is such a bitch sometimes. And exactly how does an apparently insignificant boy from a remote town like Elyria is capable of achieving such greatness? Easy, you become a legend. Since I was never capable of defending myself with my fists I had to do it any other way. Art is my weapon, so the louder it went the better. Besides, the town always needed a little color and an identity. I was arrested several times but well worth it because the goal was to make the ideas linger, and I was all about ideas. We got lots of parents pissed off when we cruised the streets on Halloween nights. I was very fond of red and didn´t have any problem splattering white walls with paint with critters evoking famous serial killers.

Nowadays we continued to bring in a little chaos when others least expected it. The place was rocking, even some guys I hadn´t seen in years came all the way down to the merry land of SoHo where I dare say anything can happen. We even brought some interesting vermin from The New York Magazine and others from Berlin, and the rest from Tokyo. It sounded like fun but again at some point this turned into a serious business. Ever since the late 1990s street art became more specialized and carefully crafted forming entire teams. And yes, it´s still illegal. Yet now we had full access to produce chaos on a space roughly about 72 by 24 inches.

The show was divided in five teams, but the highlight was of course my collaboration with the Japan team known as Shojo One. They had their history as well but when they saw how incredibly sophisticated their aesthetic was they began to hire them for serious publicity, and that´s the point where an artist becomes a designer. I made fun of them sometimes saying that they were caught between two worlds but when I started getting commissions then I took it back; the customer is alwayzzzz right. For Janie Wu and her comrades this was going back a little bit to the old days when there was nothing tying them to the ground, and they jumped up and down like rabbits.

The young and the old watched patiently as we splattered the canvas with vibrant tones of red, white and blue with acrylic applied by hand and spray painting. The concept included some very wicked bunnies holding space age guns against a very messy background, courtesy of moi. That´s what it looked like in the end; we could change it as many times as we wanted since we applied a layer of white from time to time. M applied some final touches on the critters that Janie traced. Cuteness is not my cup of tea, but this was a huge deal to them; it´s an industry that attacked little kids, filthy adults and otakus; a sort of media-devouring geek.

The piece was untitled, yet the point is to have nothing prepared; a completely empty space. Then to some very mind-blowing tunes live painting is done before your eyes so that you can see art come to life instead of waiting for it to come out of a studio. Although it seemed like a very hot idea in fact it was exhausting. I think I lost some practice from my days on the streets, so it was going back to my roots in a way. In reality we finished the work in about two hours. Edith was sitting on the floor with her eyes fixed upon me and became my unofficial cheerleader. I think I even had groupies and I wasn´t even a rock star.

It seemed that Feivel, who had a very mean look like a mafia guy reeled in some potential clients for more commissions; some of them were more eccentric than I was. At the end of the evening the paintings that were sold were used to benefit The Black Cherry Collective; an aspiring group of street artists. They helped me once so in return I helped them. Still, others looked at me like I was the rabbit in a pet store waiting to be bought. Let´s hope I don´t have a nasty dream about this.