VUE

of the train, displaying your artwork on people's bodies and that really appealed to me and I picked up a tattoo machine and made a career out of tattooing the last 16 years. I felt it was just another form of graffiti. You can call it street art, you can call it graffiti art, but it's really raw folk art. I like to believe that it's folk art and I'm a folklorist. I like that. You talk about using graffiti and rap to tell your story, but tattooing is a way of telling other people's stories. Exactly. It's been something hands on that I've created on my own. Me and my peers, we kind of made this from nothing, from the streets, so we're very proud of it and pioneered a lot of this stuff. And now it's nice to see that you can actually make a career and a living and not just that it's become so popular and appreciated as an artform, so it's great to see it come full circle. It's nice to see that this eventually turned out to be something you can be very proud of, make your mom proud. It's amazing to me that my paintings would hang in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or Gunter Sach's private collection in Germany. It's a dream come true that you can do something that you love and people probably frowned upon when we were younger but now turned into something legitimate. It's amazing how times have changed. And now you see these big brands and other kinds of craftsmen tipping their hat at this craft as well. Like recently, I painted an Aston Martin which was pretty prestigious, that a company like Aston Martin would come to an artist from Brooklyn and ask him to collaborate on something that amazing. Did that make you nervous? I've painted train cars which made you way more nervous that the cops were after you, but it's prestigious and it's a mark of a hundred years of craftsmanship, to put that in my hands and appreciate my own craftsmanship. And they wanted to make a bold statement which was very risky of them and when you see the car, don't be fooled, it's not a car for the average driver to go drive on the weekends, this is an art piece that belongs in a museum or gallery as a statement that artists make. What was your creative process when painting the car? Was it improvisational? Very much so because looks are deceiving, that car has not a flat surface on it, it's very curvy, it's an incredible work of art. They approached me because they liked the fact that I'm a multi-ranged artist and they were looking for something tattoo inspired. So they wanted to treat the car as if it was someone getting tattooed. Like someone that walks into my shop, you never know the surface because everyone's body is different, so you have to wrestle with the skin texture, same with the car. You can't approach it, put a paint brush to it and get a straight line, so I had to go back to the days of my youth painting trains and take out the spray cans and go at it with that kind of excitement and improv. What's your involvement now with the graffiti community? I'm still doing it. It's still growing and myself, as an artist, I like to push myself as far as I can take it. Maybe some of the painting might become more refined or I might lose or gain a technique but I like to think I got that same fire burning in me as a child about telling these stories and using these tools that are in front of me. Right now I could be doing some lettering on a tattoo but then switch to something more fine on canvas and always have the graffiti spirit and that soul of the child that wanted to make a name for himself. V U E N J . C O M 70

• Cover