At the bottom of the garden is Steve’s studio, his haven, filled with work in progress and shelves stacked high with multi-coloured spray cans and paints. Steve explains “Graffiti has always been my passion but it went on the back-burner for decade. I was getting married, buying a house, having a son and paying bills.


I got back into it 10 years ago, after establishing Urbn Fabrik, a graffiti networking site connecting over 10,000 artists across the globe. Seeing their work opened my eyes a bit and made me wonder why I wasn’t doing stuff for myself any more.”


At his day job as a Graphic Designer, Steve was used to working to customer’s briefs and often didn’t have the creative energy left at the end of the day to work on his own projects. Since working more recently as a computer games artist, and surrounded by creative people he respects, he’s been inspired to spend more time in his studio.


A quick glance at his work doesn’t nearly do justice to the thought that goes into it. If you delve deeper you can begin to de-construct the colours and lines, discovering what lies beneath. The ‘eureka’


moment for his style came from the street, at a painting jam. “This wall must have been painted every week for 25 years by different artists, so a huge layer of paint had built up. We noticed rain had blistered a corner of it, so we chipped away and pulled a chunk off. It was like tearing plastic off the wall and left this great effect where you could see the different layers beneath. I wanted to try a technique to recreate this idea of several paintings underneath each other, and so this is what I’ve been developing. I build up the picture with darker colours first and work out to lighter ones. You can follow the coloured shapes round the painting to see the layering technique.”


A fellow graffiti artist and constant inspiration is Remi Rough, part of the UK’s abstract graffiti movement. “I love his composition; it looks really simple, but is very hard to recreate yourself.” Other influences include Picasso, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Ian Fairweather because, “they have a graphic appeal to them, the use of line and the way they construct their paintings.” Admiring the lines, colours and depth of layers in Steve’s art, you can instantly see the connections.


88 www.styleofwight.co.uk


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