Interview by A. Mohammad

Born in 1976 in Boston and based in neighboring Cambridge, Caleb is an artist, writer, and educator. Caleb’s paintings and installation artwork has appeared in solo and group shows in venues in America and Europe, as murals on walls in Kathmandu, Reykjavik, Bermuda, Calcutta, Sao Paulo, and across Europe, as well as in dozens of books, magazines, and newspapers around the world. He is co-author of the Thames and Hudson book Graffiti Brasil and Street World from Thames and Hudson, Abrams and other international co-editions, author and illustrator of the children’s book, Lilman Makes a Name for Himself, and a collaborator on nearly a dozen other books. He is an editor at the popular culture hardbound bi-monthly Swindle, and has been a contributing writer to Tokion, Print, Juxtapoz, On The Go, Lemon, and many other magazines and journals. He has lectured at several international conferences and festivals, as well as Harvard Law School, Bates College, Northeastern University, and his alma mater, the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has worked with many international corporations as a creative consultant, writer, and artist. A monograph of his work, Caleb Neelon’s Book of Awesome, is due out from Gingko Press later in 2008. He dislikes winter weather.

Bombing Science: How long have you been doing graffiti? How did you start?

Caleb: I started in the early 1990s as a bored and creative teenager. 

BS: Why did you choose the name Sonik?

Caleb: It would be convenient if there were a better story of my graffiti name’s origin, but there isn’t. It’s just something I selected as a teenager.  I’m not particularly attached to it; my name is Caleb Neelon.  Sonik does have the advantage of being a word that anyone in the world can pronounce easily, like Sony, Okay, or Toyota.  Since ‘Caleb’ seems to be hard for a fair chunk of the world to pronounce, it’s handy to have an alternative.

BS: How did you start doing murals?

Caleb: Well, I was fascinated with murals since I was a little kid.  I knew I wanted to paint murals before I knew how graffiti worked, so almost as soon as I started to paint graffiti, I tried to figure out how to meld the two. 

BS: What are your favorite things to write on?

Caleb: Something new.  Something that isn’t a wall in the middle of nowhere that gets painted every few days.  But honestly, I have not been anything close to an active street painter for the past few years.  I miss it.

BS: Any favorite paint? Markers?

Caleb: Whatever is available. 

BS: How would you interpret your style? Who influenced you as you started up your style?

Caleb: Through my teens I really didn’t have any writer friends or partners, so I worked alone.  Even after I started to meet more and more people, I’ve painted by myself more than with partners through the years, and I think that’s definitely had an effect on what I do – or perhaps my lack of having a set of steady partners has kept my work cooking in its own pot.  That said, I’ve also known a number of people that have influenced, inspired, or otherwise been a catalyst for something to click in what I do.  Some of them are people I’ve painted with, some have been friends who I never got around to painting with.  Os Gemeos would be an example of the former, Espo the latter. 

BS: How did you start going global?

Caleb: My family made travel a priority, so I was fairly accustomed to going wherever.  But when I realized that I could paint wherever I went, it lit a fire under me and created an urgency and purpose to going everywhere I could.  How I did it financially early on was to live either with my mother or like a bum on my buddy’s couch, never had a car or apartment or serious girlfriend to maintain, and would work for a few months, build up a bit of money, travel somewhere, then come back and start again.  I hoped that eventually people would start flying me around to places, and it sort of has.  I have a career, home, dog and wonderful long-term girlfriend, so presently, heading off for months at a time and returning broke is not responsible, so it takes a little more planning.

BS: How has graffiti influenced your career?

Caleb: In more ways than I could possibly list here.  I’ll try and list a few, and begin by saying what I do, which is write books and magazine articles, teach, and make artwork in both fine art gallery and commercial contexts.  When I was 19 and began to write for magazines like 12oz Prophet and On The Go, they were the all-important first published pieces that any aspiring writer (that’s writer of text, not graffiti) needs.  But more importantly, it wasn’t bullshit work:  there were far fewer sources of written information about graffiti then than there are now, and some of the pieces I got to write, like the Brazil and Os Gemeos feature I did for 12oz had the task of introducing very important artists and movements to the wider world.  I’m incredibly thankful for those opportunities.  As an artist, graffiti gave me a way to roam around the world and do my thing in a big creative community that’s gone on to great things.  When I wanted to step back from what I was doing a few years back, I did my graduate degree with the expressed purpose and research question of what and how young people learn via graffiti.  Right out of grad school I got to work on the Graffiti Brasil book and Swindle Magazine.  Since then, the writing and artwork I’ve done has essentially kept that same progression, but I’ve tried to keep broadening my own subject areas.  So while a lot of what I work in or write about now has nothing to do with graffiti, graffiti was in a way the point of access for it – and just as important, an astonishing number of the people I work with have a background in graffiti as one of their common threads. 

BS: As an educator, can you explain how you incorporate graffiti into your lesson plans? Some examples? Do the students get really into it?

Caleb: I’ll explain one example here.  One project that I do fairly often is a lettering workshop with middle-school-aged kids, roughly ages 11-13.  I teach kids how to draw very basic block and softie letters with a variety of 3Ds:  standard box 3D, vanishing point 3D, and drop shadow.  These are basically exercises in perspective, and in many ways I feel that drawing letters like this offers a better demonstration of understanding of perspective than doing architectural drawings, which is often how perspective is taught.  Drawing letters is an abstract exercise; you can’t compare the R you drew to a ‘real’ 3D R, whereas you can compare the building you drew to a real building.  If you understand how 3D works on an abstract level as in lettering, you are that much farther ahead than if you learn it only on a level that can be verified by comparing with a real life example.  And, of course, kids almost universally think that graffiti is the coolest thing ever, so they are eager to learn.

BS: As the culture of graffiti spreads even more rapidly, has the culture of graffiti changed? Has it had any additions? Moreover, how the graffiti scene in the wider world different from Boston?

Caleb: I’m working on a project now which involves interviewing a lot of older NYC pioneer writers, some of whom had quit writing by the time I was born – 1976.  And in talking with these pioneers of this great movement and art form, it’s certainly hard not to see how greatly the culture has changed.  But you can’t romanticize an era you aren’t living in or recreate one, you can only be a respectful student of history and do the best work you can in the era in which you live:  that’s what they were doing and that is what the best of today are doing.  Boston, like any city, has its graffiti-specific peculiarities and insular elements, as well as a history that was shaped by its wider urban history and demographics.  And as I write this, it’s snowing.  Oof.

BS: What is your view on the big questions “is graffiti vandalism or art”?

Caleb: It isn’t a big question. 

BS: Do you have any last comments before ending this interview?

Caleb: I would like to plug my new book.  Caleb Neelon’s Book of Awesome is a new release from Gingko Press, and it is a collection of the artwork I’ve done in galleries and in the streets around the world for the past dozen years. 

BS: Shout outs?

Caleb: Ferdinand.

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