Askew Urban Development Detail
Askew Urban Development
Askew Urban Development
Askew Urban Development
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Askew The Most Defs
Askew Next Level Battle
Askew Miami
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Askew James Wallace
Berst Detail
Berst Detail
Berst Detail
Berst
Berst
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Berst
Berst Detail
Berst Detail
Ok, where do i start with this one? If your Jaw isn’t on the floor after looking at those amazing detail shots of Askew and Berst’s Netchism, well then you might be color blind, or just in shock. I decided to post all of the detail shots that Berst and Askew had sent me and not edit out any of the shots. I actually wish I had more to share with you. As you can see this will be a very large feature. I suggest if you don’t have the time to read all of it now, bookmark it for later while maybe relaxing with a good cigar and a warm glass of some top shelf cognac. For those of you that are ready here we go. We got a chance to catch up with Askew and Berst and have a conversation about many things; style, progression, Netch, fatcaps as well as many other things. Anyone that has been following graffiti lately has seen the work of Askew and Berst, and if you are like me you know that they’re pushing it to the limit, as well as redefining so many techniques and styles. I can honestly say that i have not seen anything like this in the 20+ years of painting myself. There work is amazing, a true respect and foundation in letters yet with a painterly hand abstract in texture. To be able to use a can as they do, they will restructure how many of the next generation of writers approach a wall. Here at Graffuturism we encourage and always try to showcase artists that are pushing new boundaries and thinking outside the box, well Askew and Berst have completely destroyed the box. Im glad they took the time to chat with us here is the conversation we had.
GF
I think interviews are great, but i would much rather have a talk or conversation with fellow writers. This is normally something that takes place after writers are done painting a wall, maybe at dinner after a few beers. The conversation usually turns to what is going on with each artist, projects, ideas, experiments. We might also talk about what each artist is doing with there current letters, or an aesthetic there trying to establish. In this case you guys are literally half way around the world, and you both have so many projects going on it would be almost impossible to have that type of conversation. Maybe impossible but we can try to get some of that same vibe in this conversation here.
Askew
Can’t agree more bro. I really hate the current state of graffiti journalism. Standard Q&A interviews with terrible grammar drive me crazy ha ha!
GF
Not sure if you both have been following the site but after being on the internet 24/7 I never found a site or place where I could see some of the work that I clearly see happening in world all in one place. Most of today’s work gets grouped in all the other countless blogs that just regurgitate it without much thought or perspective. What i am seeing currently worldwide, to me is huge and not many people are talking about or recognizing what is taking place. So i am trying to make that place in this site, there are no rules but i wanted to somehow document these out of the box styles and general movements currently taking place.
I recently watched an Interview from You Askew about the Urban Development Outdoor Gallery Project. The beginning of that interview where you talk about finding yourself as a painter, and not just a graffiti artist is one that has been paralleled by many artists including myself and that is one of the reasons for this site. I think this site is a parallel to that statement, not for an artist but for a whole genre. I think the more the world see’s and hears from other artists that are finding there painterly style and pushing boundaries thinking outside of the box, and evolving we can really push forward into another level of Graffiti.
So that’s what brings me to you and Berst as i have been watching you guys for awhile now and you both seem to be pushing limits piece by piece. Talk to me about your current style and how exactly you got here
Askew
To be honest, there’s no quick answer for how we got to where we are at right now. I think as artists, things are always a matter of trial and error and the gradual determination of what works for you and doesn’t over the course of your life. You develop your tastes, define parameters based on what you like from other peoples work or what sits well with your own principals or ideologies. Sometimes though, you build partnerships with other artists and the ingredients are right. The perfect balance between mutual respect and healthy competition. Berst and I have one of those friendships. We definitely share the same mentality about where graffiti needs to go but at the same time we both feel strongly about foundation and good structure behind everything else. Usually there’s a lot of discussion, a lot of honesty and heaps of genuine collaboration going on with our walls. Although we are still ego driven in the sense that we paint our names, there’s some detachment required to fully attain the ‘NETCH”.
Berst
Hey bro whats up, first of all I would like to thank you for looking into this and having a site that can branch into the type of work we are creating. The site Looks great and 100% behind it.
My thoughts are definitely what askew has already spoken about. It is, it has been, and always will be a process of trial and error and after eight years of spraying you will ultimately go through stages, phases and styles. The result of what we have ultimately been creating is definitely through a level of experimental painting and reflection of the work. Personally, when i was first drawn to piecing i was always interested in west coast wildstyle pieces. They involved a certain level of complexity and illegibility of the letters which made me really curious but at the same time i was also interested in traditional new york blockier letter shapes. My personal goal was to be the most intricate and complex and paint the largest and most colorful. After collaborating with Askew and several other artists within the last year, we have all created something that we simply could not have imagined. It is easy to do safe graffiti but i guess we’ve just had an idea of thinking outside the box and breaking traditional rules of graffiti. I have spent the last eight years working on five letters to perfect my name and if i go so far that I’m not called a writer anymore then thats just peoples opinions which doesn’t really bother me. I think the sooner people grasp the idea that there really are no restrictions and limitations to graffiti then we are all going to start seeing some crazy things.
Askew
Yeah- to further reiterate on what Berst just said, I think that writers often think in such restrictive terms about what constitutes ‘real’ graffiti. It frustrates me on some level because although I feel strongly that foundation is absolutely essential, it must be considered that Writing was born in a particular era in NYC and certain traits should be considered indigenous to that city, time and place. Today I think it’s funny that people all around the world outside of NYC paint that aesthetic and call it ‘New York Style’. Like when you actually stop and think about it for a second, it’s really funny. New York is a big place full of individuals with their own styles. People will paint a shallow caricature of the perceived NYC style though, perhaps with no true understanding of the circumstances it was born from. It could almost be insulting to them in a way, especially when you go to New York and see how open they are to new takes on this art form. When you see how many of those writers from Style Wars et al have branched out and diversified as artists, to me it was like a lightening bolt to my head. Even just revisiting Phase II’s work and seeing the sheer scope of ideas he explored and the immense amount of subtext behind the letters is overwhelming. I think personally that Dondi White’s death spawned a renaissance of sorts and forced people to revisit and appreciate his work again with fresh eyes. When the book came out, it was amazing to see how he handled letters with such a perfect and almost understated approach – finding the balance between simple and complex. I think at that point, there was a worldwide shift back towards the perceived ‘classic NYC’ aesthetic. Sometimes it seems weird to see a pastiche of Dondi-ism’s painted in some remote place on the opposite side of the world and I often wonder how that looks for people that knew him or were his contemporaries.
Berst
As far as I can understand in my own mind, graffiti that came from New York came from painting trains. there was a particular style that was created within that period of time for that specific place. For any city or country to draw on these ideas of getting up and painting stylized letter shapes is great and I think for people starting off in the graffiti game it is definitely necessary to understand all of that information and how significant it has been to lead to where we are now. The way I see it is, if I’m painting a legal wall I don’t need to paint a piece of graffiti that is completed within three hours. i am painting something that SHOULD be different to an illegal piece on any surface such as a trackside, freight or a train. I may take certain aspects of illegal painting and bring it to the table but ultimately the only vision I see is creating something that I otherwise normally cannot create in other circumstances. people either can’t be bothered taking that long on a piece because they don’t think it’s the true essence of graffiti or think it is a waste of time and paint. I can guarantee that if anybody that normally spends three hours on a piece, if you spent three times the amount of time, your results will be phenomenal. The reason for this is because during this time you are engaged, reflecting, experimenting and forced outside of your comfort zone. A turning point in the way I approach painting that has lead me to this point is when i started taking longer to paint my pieces. A couple of years ago Rime (MSK) was in new zealand and he asked me why I only took eight hours to paint this legal piece. I answered with something stupid like “So I can get a flick before it gets dark”. on my last piece, I spent ninety hours.
GF
To me time is irrelevant in painting especially in my case I can take 2 days painting but in all actuality it took about 2 hrs of actual painting time. The fact that I am more of a social painter and I approach painting the same way I approach smoking a cigar I enjoy every minute of it. I think my current style allows me to actually not have to work as much as it involves watching the piece more and talking myself into not touching it rather than making it more complex. When I look at the intense paintings of both your guys work I really can sit and spend forever just finding small nuances that I know might have been on accident but were made on purpose. That is the truest example of form in my opinion and you guys are really mastering this subtlety. I was taking a cab ride home with Rime from a Wall in Barcelona in 2007 and we had just got done finishing a wall he was the last to leave and I waited to share a taxi. He gave me some advice as I hadn’t painted in a couple years and I was really rusty and it showed. He told me to start with painting with a fatcap until I felt comfortable again. To me that seemed like the most backward advice cause I wasn’t ready to control a fatcap especially for a piece, but now I see 3 years later what he was talking about too bad I didn’t listen. Ha ha I had to learn the hard way. Both of your guys use of the fatcap in your current style is masterful, and really lets me see deep into your line intentions. How integral is this into your style?
Askew
To be honest, the use of fatcaps, particularly the Astro came about through a series of circumstances and subsequent thinking. When I made the transition into painting far more traditional pieces around 2003, I was tending to contrive my line work a lot. By this I mean I was building lines up from fat to skinny with Banana caps and cutting things back to get a sharp, graphic result. I was motivated in a lot of ways to focus on traditional letters by my crew mates Can2 and Atom. Also when I was looking over my photo collection I felt unhappy with the walls I was doing, especially alongside a lot of more traditional painters because their work had more immediate impact than mine. I got the book ‘Writing: Urban Calligraphy and Beyond’ as a gift from Atom and was blown away by how the Berlin writers (Poet, Phos4, Amok, Tagnoe to name a few) worked within the confines of foundational graffiti yet managed to bend and twist the letters so they had the sense of dancing in space. I started trying to achieve that but when you are contriving the lines and painting with a type of ‘vector’ approach it limits what you can achieve in way of attaching a certain movement or sense of gesture to the lines in a piece. I saw a lot of people like Rime, Revok etc using pretty large caps, like at least an NY. Also Smash was using the odd level 5 gold cap line on his pieces although never to the extent we started to, he was still very refined in his approach. I think I just started gravitating towards fatter caps because of the flexibility of them. You can do blown out lines with tubular effects. You can get that fat to skinny result without cutting back. You can do half pressure or spitty effects that can be used to create both pencil thin line work (Os Gemeos) or a dusty/spitty effect that I use a lot to give my work a real ‘sprayed’ feeling. Also consider the astro can be used to achieve so much 3D effect as far as positioning it in space. This adds so much life and tension to a piece. I’ve said it before, the closer it feels like doing a tag or a throw up to me the better it turns out. That’s nothing to do with the time expended, just a statement about how much I love to feel each line I spray.
Berst
That too is also an interesting concept to gage with whether people that spend this long painting a piece trying to set new benchmarks ultimately lead to creating a different future for the next generation of writers coming up. personally I do think that there has been a decline in tagging in Auckland, New Zealand and kids are getting into throw-ups and pieces earlier. people that I was surrounded by in my earlier days, it was all about tagging and getting up and I’m sure it will always be an under pinning motivator for graffiti which is great but for people like Askew that have been painting for nearly twenty years I think it is only natural for him to have grown this far and broken so many barriers. in this day and age, if your pieces aren’t getting dissed and your work is going to stay up then why not spend that extra effort and do something that much better
Askew
I also came up in an era in Auckland graffiti where pieces couldn’t be painted in more than one session because kids would destroy them within minutes of completion. Auckland has really changed a lot in the last few years…
GF
Wow. Now thats what I’m talking about, I think that the direction you guys are going and just the general thought process is as interesting as the work if not more. To me process and the idea is something that gets lost in the final piece, and when artists actually are starting to think about painting that is exciting. Making a conscious decision to take an path that you know might get you ridiculed or written off is not an easy task. Being part of a crew myself that pretty much took a stance against the normal status quo it was very difficult at the time and although I knew what I was attempting to do I had no clue what the rest of my culture and scene would think about it. To me I also like Berst was brought up on west coast wildstyles and pushed that style as much as I could. But I think as artists we always are trying to find something new, a new bar, a new shape, a new color combo. For me I ran into a whole new idea of how to approach a piece. Most would say at the top of my wildstyle I pretty much switched up to a total abstract style. I remember thinking to my self that graffiti was missing emotion, and I tried to create a feeling when someone looked at one of my pieces. I was about to step off a cliff the closest thing I had to a net was other artists like Joker that were there to push the things in a new direction. I think it makes things a lot easier when you have a partner or crew that also believes in what you are doing and if anything else trusts you. Its the simplest ideas that sometimes create the most hatred from traditional writers. I was just having this conversation today in Facebook Fellow Artist She one made a comment about The Chrome Angels and how he was deeply saddened that The Chrome Angels style and aesthetic hadn’t been adopted 25 years later as the standard of graffiti, and that there isn’t anything as fresh out today. My take on it was that our culture is our own worse enemy and stunts growth. That most writers would be automatically seen as biters and ridiculed if influence was too similar. I also think that unless the style was passed down from other Chrome Angels it would more than likely die, as it did only until recently has there been a revival of the TCA style. The point is that we are all conditioned to a point to call other writers biters, or dismiss other writers as having no merit if not following the rules or styles that they deem as proper. To me I have for over 20 years done a piece with an arrow, and I probably never will, most would dismiss me right there as not following tradition. I can see the same thought process for the future writers, or I hope they would take the pieces they need and leave what they don’t need. Without rules doesn’t mean without foundation. I think all of us have paid our dues and focused on the foundation first. The truth is that is just the first step towards forever, and only one step towards what ever we can think of next. I know this is a lot of information but it is needed to be worked out and talked about, without dialogue like this people really wont understand the next decade of why things went the direction they did. So next question doing the research for the site and searching hundreds of artists across all different kinds of sites, I literally ran into so many groundbreaking artists, I have no clue where they came from. I really don’t even know how they got there. The thing is that they all had a common aesthetic across continents, and have no clue of each others artwork. Its something that i think goes deeper than this conversation can go unless we write a book, ha ha. What do you think about the differences in styles that are taking place across the world, we all know about the MSK’s and the New York writers. What about the Greek Writers, the French they are doing some really groundbreaking work right now and a lot of doesn’t even involve actual letters. What are your thoughts on the total detachment of letters, or there movements in general?
Askew
I understand a few of the negative sentiments regarding the breakdown of distinct regional styles but to be honest, it’s just indicative of the era we live in. There’s always that tendency to romanticize about the good old days and feel threatened by change but regardless, it’s just going to happen. You can either ride the wave or get swept under it. In an ideal world, you will find a way to highlight the strengths of what is happening in your region via the context given through good documentation.
Berst
To my understanding there is not an overly huge amount of detachment from the letters in my work. (as far as i can see) if you look at a photo of any of my pieces that i have marked up, what is it? Its letters. I’m not trying to mark up “abstract” letters or wack letters. I’m painting letters that i have been influenced from, by hundreds of writers and artists to develop these shapes that i now paint. Realistically I take no claim in creating something so new that people should all do this or paint this particular style. It’s merely been a process of development of my own take on things. If my work falls so far out of the classified notions of the graffiti zone I have no problem being classified as these other things, so please message me and let me know. Don’t want to be an outsider of the movement right?
GF
I just read your blog entry on Netch and its explanation of the term blew me away, great concept I guess the universal mind is strong lately as one of the reasons i started this site it was an attempt to explain the next level of everything graf related whether it be a style an idea, a movement, a step in different direction whatever it may be. It’s amazing that Netch is on a parallel to my own thoughts for graffuturism. We have both been painting Graf for so long and I’m sure we have seen so many styles fads come and go I think this new movement is different, in a way it is like a wave that has been building over the last decade. Now with social media, and self publishing as Futura put it in the interview I just did with him the reality of a global movement and the viral ability of the movement will lead to next level Netch or graffuturism as I call it. I don’t think anyone can stop it not dogmatic thinking writers that want there piece of history to last forever, or all the haters out there that cant fathom change. I might be too old to make a huge impact as a writer but I hope to help the movement and progression through this site, listening, engaging, and featuring artists that might be on the path to what is next. I appreciate you guys taking the time to have this conversation with me and share your thoughts, I know you guys don’t need the exposure or hype as your already are International Graffiti Stars, but talking to you I know you do it for higher purposes other than ego and fame and that’s refreshing in such talented artists.
Askew
Ha ha Thanks dude… I really appreciate it eh.
To be honest I think Netch is like a branch off the Graffuturism family tree more than them being individual of each other. Where ever you see a re-ordering of the approach to painting or a total deviation from the predictable course it seems to fit well under the graffuturism banner. In our case, when all the colors and detail is removed you often find a very simple and almost classic letter shape underneath. The point for us was to tick all the boxes rather than one or the other. When people draw separations between style and technique I get really angry because most of the time they are reciting a cliche rather than speaking from any real basis. It annoys me because when you alter the approach and attack a letter with a different technique it can alter the end result so dramatically that it creates a new style. Process is always so greatly overlooked and sometimes we go to exhaustive measures during our process that people never see. It’s rewarding in the end though because it feels like painting rather than an extreme sport or penis-size contest ha ha!
Wow! What a conversation and amazing pics, much respect and thanks to Askew and Berst for blessing us with this feature. We look forward to watching and sharing any of your new projects in the future. Till then you guys can see more of Askew and Berst on there sites below.
