We first came across Attai’s @butch_attai graffiti on the streets of Shoreditch and then on the roof of Jealous Gallery.
Intrigued to find out more about him, 99Shoreditch tracked him to a coffee shop
in the neighbourhood and quizzed him about turf wars, wading waist-deep in
dubious waters for your art and never quite learning to draw hands properly.
Growing up in a small town outside
Birmingham, he got into graffiti in his late teens. "I was a skateboarder
and the two things went together...loads of skaters seemed to be writers too.
The best skate spots were usually in rundown areas, and some of the best
graffiti happened to be appearing in these kind of places too... This was in
the pre-internet days when there were hardly any legal walls, everything had to
be painted at night or in some hidden derelict building". Attai talks
animatedly of these early days, when fresh work would appear every week along
the miles of train lines that led into the heart of the city. There was a huge
secret society at work, all with the same teenage urge to rebel and get their
slice of fame.
For many of his peers the need to
keep painting dissipated over time, but for Attai it continued as strong as
ever. After leaving school he decided to channel his passions via art
school. It was here that he studied sculpture and started to think about
the form of the letters he was painting. Skip forward 20 years, the
letters became more and more broken down and increasingly mechanical, with an
eye on fragmenting shapes into smaller and smaller forms. Tiny houses
incorporated themselves and later became the central focus of his walls. The
stilts were a later addition - prompted by the winter floods of 2013 and a
handy artistic device to add complexity to his wall compositions.
There is also a political slant to
the houses "the people with money are getting further and further away
from the rest of us, it’s about the haves and the have nots. The city is
changing and there's a real chance London could lose its creative
edge".
The stilt houses have been Attai's
'thing' for the last 2 years, working out new ways to depict this symbol can be
testing. Although he is enjoying having a consistent visual identity, he
strives to keep his work constantly evolving and changing in response the
things he sees around him.
As well as challenging himself to
find new ideas for his work, he is also exploring different locations in which
to paint. He recently found himself knee deep in a tidal river in the small
hours, armed with a headtorch, emulsion and some bitumen spray paint, “I wanted
the stilts to get covered by the rising tides, I'm interested in the effects of
time and nature on my work, the way things change and decay over time.”
I ask whether he is perhaps interested in developing pieces for the art world, so he can record some for posterity, rather than see it painted over. He explained he has done some work on canvas he is proud of, but sometimes it loses the spontaneity and magic of painting on the street. He has just bought one of his own pieces from a builder on a Shoreditch building site so that he could capture a part of this phase of his artwork.
We talked about the differences
between street art and graffiti and he explained there has always been a
healthy rivalry between the two camps. With his art school education he can
identify with both sides, but still sees himself very much as a graffiti
artist. “All forms of graffiti are valid and we shouldn’t get too precious
about it. You need new recruits who are feeling their way around and doing it
how they want, because these are the people who will ultimately be bringing
something new to the scene.”
He feels the current trend may be moving away from polished street art pieces, with the pendulum swinging back to
classic graffiti writing. There is a sense of things coming full circle as
lettering, over imagery, becomes more prevalent again.
He is a big fan of the Shoreditch
scene, but is worried the places and spaces to paint are becoming fewer and
fewer. The Lennox Street and Willow Street hoardings won’t be there forever and
he wonders where people will go after that, “It would be a shame to clean
everything up to the point of it being too sanitised. We need raw culture
untouched by commercial influences and we need things to stay dirty – it’s part
of Shoreditch’s charm.”
After challenging him to create a
great little piece especially for 99shoreditch on Blackall Street, we enquired what the best thing about being a graffiti
artist. His reply, “genuinely doing something for yourself and the fact that
you are anonymous and can be anyone”. So with that we left him to melt back
into the crowd.
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