AMBOE – “You ever wander into a random alley, look up and see one of your old tags on a rooftop and wonder to yourself how did that get there I don’t even remember doing that and then you vaguely recall that you had caught something on the other side of the roof facing the main street that ran for like two days and the only picture you got of it is some blurry slant angled shot with trees blocking half the frame and who cares it didn’t even look that good anyway and what am I even doing with my life but hey at least the tag is still running?
I’ve been writing AMBOE for a number of years, but I suppose I got serious around 2012 when I fell in love with trains. I represent the Kung Fu Crew, the best group of dudes with one of the worst three-letter combinations ever conceived. I was born in the Bay Area, California and I stay here because I like to be able to visit my mom without getting on an airplane.
I draw a lot of inspiration and take a lot of shit from my hatin’ ass crewmates in KFC, but when it comes to other freight writers’ stuff some my favorites and influences at the moment are Knistt, Value HM, Avenue, Mecro, Worms, Toer, Avert, Corpse, Parmes, Panze, Jake, Legal, Gets, and Bozo. As far as visual artists in general, I’m a big fan of Ed Ruscha, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Edward Hopper, Jenny Saville, and Frans Snyders.
My own style of graffiti is a painfully drawn out process of over-analyzing and beating myself up and thinking maybe I should have taken up a trade or figured out how real estate or business works instead of chain smoking and scanning everywhere I go for tags and filling useful space in my brain with a bunch of worthless knowledge about who was most up in the early 2000s or how to defeat a barbed wire fence or start an S from the top or bottom. I also look at hand painted signs for font ideas and have a strong nostalgia for old cartoons. I’ll be the first to admit that my style isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but what I’ve found is that what I lack in natural artistic talent, I can make up for by putting in a lot of work. I guess that’s why I gravitate toward going as big and legible as possible on trains. If a line goes by with fifty other writers on it but my shit is the biggest and cleanest and most readable, the average person is probably going to remember that car out of all the rest, and that’s the effect I’m going for. I try and stay well rounded though, and as long as I’m painting something I feel okay.
Shout out to the Bay Area, I love you even though you’ve changed, shout out to KFC, who will undoubtedly roast me for talking so much about myself, shout out to all the benchers who flick my shit, the train workers who let me hop lines to pull the tape I always forget about, and shout out to the ladies at the self checkout at Home Depot and the security guard with the bejeweled acrylic nails who always lets me slide even though my receipts don’t match and I never have a good explanation for why.”
AMBOE KFC
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