NBAF 2010
INTERVIEW
a portfolio full of just graff, they’re gonna turn around and just push you straight back out the door.
TONY ALLEN T
ony Allen is one of Norwich’s most notorious graffiti artists, and one thing that makes him so well
known, is the fact that he’s brought the inherently underground scene overground, where we all get to experience it. With Tony’s mark left all round town already, his biggest mark left to date is in his studio space-come-art shop, Sticky Fingerz on St Augustine’s. Tony returns to NBAF to curate the Graffiti Jam, and we were delighted to catch him for a wee chat…
What is graffiti to you? It’s like another extreme sport; essentially it’s the most dangerous game of cat and mouse you’ll ever play, because you’re playing it with your liberty. Graffiti is all about getting fame, so in other words getting your name up and other [graffiti] writers seeing it. This is what I always find really hard to quantify with some people, is that un-like street artists …like say Banksy, street artists paint for the public as a whole; they paint for you and everybody out there. It’s something clever, something
Norwich Body Art Festival 2010
political or something that’s instantly catching and noticeable or funny, whereas writers paint for each other.
So you’re not bothered about the actual general public appreciating it… Not really. Whether or not someone likes it or loves it is immaterial when it comes to graff, it really is, because it’s something personal to me and my peers. My peers recognise my style; they recognise all those sorts of things - I don’t need to have any self-congratulatory slap on the back from the general public or be told off.
So do you find a lot of people snobby towards the work you do?
Not a lot of people, but very often you’ll find that the trained artist - the art school artist – is trained to look at stuff a little bit too much. With graffiti being so immediate, normally that immediate reaction is all it requires, from another writer for instance. So of course you get kids going to art schools, who are brilliant graffiti artists, but if you tried to walk into an art school with
I guess graffiti is a personal thing… Exactly, I mean like, when I go and do workshops at school and youth centres I’m not only teaching the history of graffiti art and where it came from and why it happened and how I got into it etc, I don’t go there to teach them how to paint… I can show them can control, I can show them how to apply the paint to a surface in a way that its not gonnaa drip and the way of getting crisp lines and all the rest of it, but I cant do any more then that. Usually you’ve just got to give someone the opportunity to try and do it themselves and build up their own style and direction.
Tell us about your shop, Sticky Fingerz… The shop’s about having a safe place to come and sit and talk and meet other artists. It’s not just about graff its about connecting people together from different parts of the artist community. The main thing we say to people when they come in, is that we don’t discern between ages or abilities, so if you’re 14 years old and it’s the first canvas you’ve drawn or what ever and you like enough that you want to stick it up on the wall and put a price on it, stick it on the wall and put a price on it. The fact that it might sit there for ever and never go any where doesn’t matter you know, you’ve still got a piece of art work on the wall.
What’s your own greatest ambition as an artist? Just to influence other people into having fun with art and not take it too seriously…
Emma Noyeaux
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