So this bit. Well this bit is all about me. Call it narcissism, call it glory seeking – call it whatever the hell you wish – I don’t care. Because this bit is all about me and all about the amazing journey and many adventures I have had, shared, survived and an attempt at explaining my love, and I do mean love, for something which has become such a huge part of my life – graffiti.
There will be no half hearted attempts at caressing any egos here, not that I do that anyway, but this journal is so very important. Earlier this year (2016) I was critically ill. I survived (cheers) but I also changed. I stopped really thinking about everything in ways I had before – without getting overly deep – I did two polar opposites and this created the way I decided to move forward with my life. I STOPPED caring so much but at the same time I STARTED caring so much more. Yes, yes – totally crackers I know. I guess you had to be there…… but it makes sense to me. I like to think of it as my big bang moment. My beloved kids aside one thing has become apparently clear to me over the last few years – that I have an actual silent partner that I turn to whenever I need love, laughter, support, an adrenalin boost, time out, an excuse, a telling off and pretty much any sort of life advice. And in some ways – I have turned to this as some sort of parent replacement – graffiti has been an ‘often’ visitor into my world, its impossible to have been a wild and er….’creative’ (i.e. naughty) teenager in the eighties without it having been around you somehow and although I might not have been scribbling on walls (desks yes – I would like to publicly apologise to my old school, Dartmouth High School, for the amount desks I scratched the name Spider, as I was called, into with the compass that was never used for maths lessons mostly because I wagged pretty much every single one of them – sorry – but as you burnt down 15 years ago I’m sure its forgiven), when I look back I can see the evidence of the culture in my world from way back then. Throughout my teenage years you were there, on a bus. Throughout my mad YTS years, attempting to prove to the world I was grown up, there you were on the underpasses. Through the hundreds of art books I bought and lost myself in through years of struggling with the ups and downs of life, you were there. Through my college days, as I mastered painting and had to produce sketch books for assessments, you were there. Through my first degree, art history, with me a feisty one regaining a confidence I had been forced to supress, I argued your case refusing to write essays on Monet but rather a celebration of the life and times of Keith Haring, you were with me. Through the years of darkness where I was lost and my cameras were almost mothballed but the canvas’s I made and the sketches I, albeit badly, drew to keep myself sane, you were still there.
So, go on, ask me…..’how did you get into graffiti Little Wing?’……….
