Gorilla
When and how did you get into graffiti?
- I started getting interested in graffiti around 86-87 when Style Wars was broadcasted on Swedish television for the first time. I was too young to get up on any walls at this time, but did my first sketches and started break dancing with my friends early. It took me a few more years to get to start bombing and a few more months to also start painting. Since then I’ve been active except for a few years when I was too deep into the music industry to really have the time to paint. The last three years I’ve been going even harder than when I started. Today I’m doing tags at least a few times every week and is usually painting during the weekends.
How did you develop your style?
- I’m still developing. I don’t really think there’s such a thing as a fully developed style. I just continue where I stopped last time. Every piece and every sketch is a step in a certain direction, more than an example of my style. I like to be able to do a piece at a wall without a sketch on paper so I tend to keep my style pretty simple. I do pieces mostly because I can hang out with my friends doing it – tagging is my more real part of the scene. And when I do tags – I mostly just put up my signature the exact same style as always. I’m not a fan of doing different styles when it comes to tags, I just wanna put up my logo, my trademark, everywhere.
You’re doing more work connected to graffiti than the actual painting – tell us a little about this…
- I run the YouTube-channel and Instagram-account TagsAndThrows and I’ve been documenting the tagging part of graffiti for a long time. I’ve got at least 200.000 photos of tags and I’ve released a few movies about this part of the culture. I’m also doing a lot of graffiti workshops in my hometown of Stockholm and I’m involved in different projects connected to graffiti.
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