I have an understanding with myself... (just letting you know) my hunger for creativity is in all realism, something that allows me to accept different concepts that melt into one word... ART. I marvel, step back, shake my head then step forward at the vicarious nature and thrill that people get from doing something 'not quite legal', even though graffiti is now becoming more acceptable within the art world and legitimately acknowledged by critiques alike.
WHAT also fascinates me is how high and low those artists will climb, hang and dangle to make their mark. There is something addictive about hunting out painted and stenciled works around the city and surrounding areas, then photographing them.
As a person and a facade, it is easy to hide behind this awesome GRAFFITIdawg persona. If I could, I would spray paint you a small picture so that you may tag along a stenciled path into my interest concerning the world of graffiti.
My interested concerning graffiti has been building up over the years to now and I am eager to find out what comes next. Like many, I have had a long-standing fascination with illustrative representations, not just ordinary old but archaeological old.
As an artist myself, though not in the style of graffiti, it has been my opinion for a number of years that graffiti illuminates and extols contemporary urban culture and the myths that have arisen behind the concept.
In the United States around the 1990s, I traveled and viewed first hand an indigenous American Indian rock painting in Utah. My main reaction was... “WOW... a human being drew and scratched that around a thousand years ago”. I just want to reach out like many others and touch it, feel it, even make a little mark to let people know I have been there, (note to all: I did not).
Even before my travels, my dawg-head was in the history books. I was filled with awe and wonderment at the likes of Pompeii's colourful murals, Greece's graphic brothel and political graffiti that acted like sign posts and adverts, scratching of names within the Pyramids of Giza from early 18th Century Western travellers and lately seeing pictures online of Australian Aboriginal rock art that is over 4000 years old. Having access to the Internet has only fuelled my addiction to graffiti; the concept of accessing others' contemporary works just allows the addiction to expand in different varied directions.