Why do you like to paint letters in particular?While I do appreciate some elements of what I would call accepted art, it really doesn’t move me in anyway, I find gallery environments to be stagnant and pretentious, created for arrogant people to gloat, boast and generally swallow any old rubbish that’s peddled to them as the next big thing. I see graffiti that isn’t created to be sold (legal or illegal) as more honest than any art created for a monetary purpose as it is done for no other reason than self-satisfaction. Above all of that I just like seeing my name up. I should also pick up on the D.I.Y culture, not waiting around for someone else to give you the go ahead or do it for you. The world we live in is governed by people who say submit yourself to a higher power because they know best, they can market it better, water it down, strip any meaning from it and feed from it’s soul. But what do we get at the end of that? A product that means as little to me as a Justin Bieber song or a coca-cola advert. I’m not saying graffiti is a protest movement in the slightest but so long as people are out there dropping tags, throws and painting trains it can’t be completely

co-opted by big business using legal pieces and “celebrity” writers like Cope to sell products to the youth market as being cool.

How did you get into graffiti? What made you pick up a can?I always liked drawing, I was habitually writing on walls. As a kid I was somewhat of a little shit that pushed boundaries to see how far I could go. So the whole stigma surrounding graffiti was attractive – doing something that you’re not supposed to be doing.I started to notice all the tags on the streets which made me more aware, but it just happened, I didn’t consciously think ‘I’m going to get into graffiti’ I just fell into it alongside skateboarding. I picked up a can from my grand-dad’s garage and wrote on the wall aged 13/14 and that was it. Tags came first, the more I looked at graff – this was before I had access to the internet – the more different elements of it I noticed. Tags, dubs, throw-ups. Then pieces just followed on from that. It’s been an on/off love affair ever since.

Pure Escapism

How does it make you feel when you’re out painting?It’s pure escapism. I don’t think about anything else when I’m painting. I focus my energies on it. I paint in a dyslexic way, my head is occupied with confusion trying to get everything done as quickly as possible so my mind is really jumbled. It’s like the world has stopped and this makes me feel alive and at one with myself. When the madness of the world stops it gives you time to relax.

Graffiti is a style of typography in itself so everyone has a style within a style effectively, how do you find yours and do you have any influences and inspirations?By sketching and developing upon sketches. You analyse your sketch, turn your letters upside down and back to front. Play around with the structure, add bits or take bits off.You soon see what works for you and what doesn’t. You have to get it all to balance so it fits like a jigsaw or not depending what you want to do. There are no boundaries contrary to what some people in the scene will tell you.Inspiration comes from anywhere and everywhere. I’m influenced by what’s

going on around me. By graffiti from abroad and the different way in which they do things. Conversations, jokes, music anything can spark it. I’m influenced by train writers and their ability to utilise relatively simple colour schemes and letter forms in comparison with legal wall writers, because they have to get it done quickly and in a pressured environment but still get the piece to burn.

What do you make of the general public view that illegal graffiti is anti-social and criminal behaviour?I do it for myself because it makes me feel good. I don’t care for the majority of people’s opinions, law makers or the so called moral majority of society – it’s all hypocritical, the farce surrounding the whole street art is ok and writing will not be tolerated highlights this. I don’t feel what I do is actually that wrong in comparison to half of the stuff that’s permitted by these so called law abiding citizens and as far as the government and police go, I have absolutely no respect for them, they’re parasites protecting and flourishing in positions of privilege at the expense of the working class.

Free Orgie

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.Plato

Colour. Colour is meaningful and a

powerful psychological tool. Colour is widely used in commerce, fashion, logo design and merchandising, from ipods to cars, and from sweaters to nail polish. Different companies have different methods to make people buy their products and one of them is col-our. Why do people like certain colours? Why do they prefer some colours than others? There are some people who would turn the world upside down just to fi nd a yellow car and others who would hate the idea of having one. It is very important to understand that the psychological perception of colour is subjective, for example what appeals to various cultures is different. As one of the explanations to that question scientists think that evolution is the answer. The sense of self preservation in humans is a survival instinct which has been with us probably since the beginning of our existence. In the past humans had no knowledge of the food that we have now, so when they found a new source of food they were rely-ing on their senses. If the food looked bad for example in the shades of dark

brown or blue it might be rotten or mouldy. Brown also evokes the feeling of dirt and faeces and there is a dip in preferences of that colour in countries around the world. Humans also had to protect themselves from different creatures, for example if an animal (snake, frog) has really bright yellow or red skin that commonly means that they are poisonous and people should stay away from them. Scientists think that another possible answer to the ques-tion is that our colour preferences are based on our positive experiences with a certain colour. Studies show that if we had a pleasant experience with a certain colour we might continue liking objects in that same colour in the future. “I might like purple more than you be-cause my sister’s bedroom was purple and I had positive experiences there,” says Karen Schloss, a graduate student in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. “Your own personal preference is determined by all the entities you’ve encountered of that col-our and how much you liked them.”

Colour

In order to look closer to that theory I am going to use

my friends as an example. I asked them which is their fa-vourite colour and looked into their lifestyle on how they show that preference in their lives. I asked them also why they were so fond of that particular colour and if it reminds them of some-thing pleasant in the past. Sarah, aged 20 loves turquoise, blue and green. Those typical colours remind her of the sea and her childhood memories where she spent her days in the seaside with her friends. Her room is decorated only in those colours and you could see pictures of the sea and ocean on everything you set your eyes on. Charley, aged 21 says that her favourite colours are black and white, she is mad about pandas, she has a huge collection of panda objects. Her room is also based on those col-

ours and she wears lots of black. The fondness of pandas might be the connection of her choices of colour. Sophie, aged 20 loves red, the prevailing clothes in her wardrobe are red. Most of the accessories she uses are in that hue. She says that she loves red because it stands out and is a very passionate and roman-tic colour- it also reminds her of pin up pictures which she also collects. After I talked to them I reached to the conclusion that sometimes our love for a certain colour is unconscious and lies deep in our minds, other times we just like a particular colour just because it evokes pleasant feelings of a past experience. Colour is like the smell or the music that recalls memories and brings them back to life, and after all who doesn’t like to remember the good old times?!

Colour