I never intended to create a book about street art. Through painting buildings and architecture, street art had become an incidental motif within my work. The buildings I was drawn to and found visually appealing were the dusty ones, the dilapidated ones, the tired ones – the exact same buildings in the same parts of town that welcomed the street artists. Yet, by replicating the street art on my version of painted walls, something strange and new happened: the art and the place became unified through the watercolour washes. No longer paint on brick, but the representation of paint on brick through paint on paint.
Whenever I had seen photos of street art and graffiti in the past, they were so often cropped in tightly, placing all the emphasis on the art or writing itself, yet simultaneously missing what made the work different from paint on canvas. They were lacking context and environment – a critical part of the story.
And so began my slow exploration of this context, through eleven cities around the world. I noticed the universal elements that tied painting on walls together, as well as identified some of the place-specific influences that directed the work. I gained a respect and understanding of graffiti writing over the months, even though it had been brightly coloured murals that gained my attention in the beginning.
Each trip to a new city would involve walking, skating or biking around, camera in hand, shooting reference photos and absorbing the place. I would talk to locals and go on art tours, drive around with graffiti writers and hear stories of each city. Occasionally, I would head out on a quest to find a specific piece, like a treasure hunt. Sometimes I would find what I was looking for, and sometimes I would not.
I had intended to include Belfast in this book, but life had other plans. My bag, containing most of my possessions, all of my handwritten research, my passport, vast quantities of reference photographs and all my essays, was stolen on the way to the airport to fly there. Belfast would have to take a back seat as I began the process of piecing the project back together from scraps.
I would then hole up somewhere in the world to paint from the reference I had gathered. For a while this was my studio in London, but the need to extract myself from life to finish the project dropped me in Malmo, Sweden where I painted, reflected, wrote and skated.
Henri Cartier-Bresson said, ‘Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.’ My painting encapsulates both of these concepts. The collection of reference photography froze the moment in the life of the wall; the works that sat on it at that time and on that day; the state of decay of the building and how many windows were smashed. Then the slow process of construction lines, perspective grids, inking and painting allowed my mind to sit inside that moment for hours, meditating on its significance, holding on to it – every corner explored with my eyes.
They say that the more you know about something, the more you know you don’t know. This book is a collection of moments and meditations on these places, yet at the end of this set of travels I realized that I had barely scratched the surface and could probably spend a lifetime visiting a thousand cities to hear a thousand stories. This is, therefore, just the beginning. It is in no way comprehensive, but the first tentative step in trying to understand the world a little better by looking at the writing on the wall.