I was born and bred in a lovely lil’ Homeswest house in Subiaco, where my Mum raised my 2 older brothers and I.
Some of my fondest memories and inspiration came from the release of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoon and merchandise. I clearly remember loving the TMNT logo and would draw it regularly, in retrospect this was a critical moment in time as it was my original foray into the world of lettering that I would later immerse myself in.
Another love I had as a child was sparked by my eldest brother Lee, who was 15 at the time, very similar in his reserved nature he opened up the world of Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons. I never played the games but the love for the Frank Frazetta artworks and painting tiny lead figurines got me really excited. I would travel to the old Forrest Chase mall and ride the glass elevator to a store called Simulations where I would pick a miniature off the wall and commission a resident artist called Lawry to paint it! It would cost me around $10-15 bucks and be ready hopefully the following week. He would paint them to a standard on par with the best of them in White Dwarf magazine, I learnt a lot about detail and would later paint them myself.
On the same afternoon I picked up my first painted miniatures, I was really looking forward to showing them to My bro Lee but tragically on that same day, not a great deal far from Simulations where I had been, he jumped to his death, 10 days before his 16th birthday.
It was not far from where he jumped that he took me on my first electric train ride, they had just come into service and he took me to a place called Satan’s Mansion. A stripped out “Blair Witch” style industrial wasteland beneath the freeway South underpass West Perth, it was actually the old Emu Brewery, a beautiful Art Deco building that was stripped bare and left to the pigeons and graffiti artists before being totally demolished years later. It was one of the scariest things ever at the time, there were holes where you could simply take a step and fall through to the floor below. The wall beneath the freeway was a graffiti ‘hall of fame’ painted by many of Perth’s best first and second generation Graffiti ‘writers’, the combination of art and exploration was the perfect combo for me but I wouldn’t rediscover the world of graffiti till around 5 years later as a 14 year old.
After my brother died one of his friends did a cool LEE rip piece on the stairway wall on the school oval. Another key moment in time.
It was at 14 that I discovered skateboarding which I dedicated a pretty solid decade too. Skateboarding gave me a completely new outlook of the streets, which I skated. There were no skate parks and that didn’t faze me because you would see so much stuff skating around with your friends trying to find the ultimate new spot! With all this exploring I discovered more graffiti art, I basically started painting graffiti art when the internet was just starting up and you really had to go on adventures to see the art, that or someone had to get a photo of the piece and go get it developed. There were 2 books available on graffiti at this point in time, the one I discovered first was “Spraycan Art” this was the follow up book to “Subway Art” which I later found. These books are basically the bible for many writers out there and are heavily responsible for spreading the graffiti art movement worldwide.
My first piece was done on a cool summers night in an abandoned block in the Subi’ industrial area where the train line was later sunk. For some reason I did it on a real crappy piece of plastic corrugated roofing that was attached to the wall? I so wish I had a photo, it would have been so shit! I didn’t even think to take photos till my mentor “grumpsta” schooled me. He was and is a huge inspiration to me as both an amazing skater and phenomenal artist who was advanced beyond his years and was also had paintings all over the city and countryside in the weirdest spots! His graffiti basically broke the rules of the Original New York Graffiti that I grew up idolizing.
I don’t remember any painting I did before I discovered spray cans.
Graffiti art creates a window of opportunity to youth that would not otherwise have a connection with paintings, let alone the world around them, graffiti provided me with the fundamentals of mural painting and incidentally forced me and my friends to become avid photographers, there were times when our pieces could be gone come 7am so we we’re like our own paparazzi!
I’ve always felt privileged to have grown up on what felt like the transition from analog to digital.
I’ve schooled a lot of kids over the years. Thousands of them and it’s been great, just takes a little persistence, some of these kids are proper young adults now and it’s nice to see so many of them working in creative fields.
I generally work in a handful of styles, sometimes with sentiment, sometimes for show and occasionally to shock but not disrespectfully.
I’ve loved seeing Perth evolve, even with its build and destroy mentality, over the top graffiti laws, false graffiti vandalism clean up figures and excessive removal of graffiti art in already neglected areas.