Creatives and their art forms

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English for Artists should highlight different art forms, e.g. profiling artists expressing themselves in the various media. The Thrash Lab vlog and YouTube playlist include a profile of Saber, a graffiti artist who has branched out. In this profile he describes the work that made him a name, similarities to typography, and how he reacts to young people today who engage in the illegal art of graffiti.

manifest something through the creative process
maintain a level of inspiration
my artist name is
I’m based in… and have been painting for X years
I knew that art was what I wanted, and graffiti was the venue that I chose.
Picture diving headfirst into your signature and making it your number one mission
Typography is held at a high level of design
We are master typographers
I was willing to risk my life and freedom
Something made me go do it
We were one of the first to use housepaint
I just took it from there
26 gallons of bucket paint were used
It just so happened to be the biggest piece in the world – the biggest illegal piece ever painted.
It became a home plate for graffiti
It takes years and years to stumble into those processes
My paintings represent 22 years of intense art-making

“Art gets a bad rap because it’s considered something that’s elite, and something that only an elite person can understand, when that’s not true. ’cause every single kid in the world picked up a crayon once and had that little spark.”

“There’s two kids I meet in the world. And there’s the kid who says, ‘Hey Saber, I’m so happy to meet you, and take the Facebook photo’ and I’m nice and I do it all, and then they say ‘Yeah, I’m a’go bombing tonight’ And I go ‘na, you should go on a computer, you know, you should do graphic design, you should get into school, that’s what’s your path is.’ And then I meet the kid who says ‘Wassup Saber’ and I go, ok, I feel it in him, and I go, ‘You know what, go crush those freeways’, because you know what, that’s all he has, and the alternative is a lot worse.”

Comments

3 Responses

  1. Better to have love and lost than to never have loved at all .
    Comes to mind.
    Sorry – a bit left field but it was something he said about dreams at the end there and i noticed that you seem to be getting as little comments as me at the moment so i thought i drop something in.
    I went to an exhibition of his a few years back and was disappointed (with the art) but he came over as a really nice guy – and i think he has taken strides.
    In the blurb for the event it said that his signature piece used 97 gallons of paint – in the video this has got bigger, i guess he just used a lot.
    It did seem to be significant JUST because it was big (the signature piece) and i wasn’t convinced that that was enough.
    But he signed my scrapbook in green felt tip and i thought that was cool.

  2. Hi Chris,

    Thanks so much for commenting – and sorry to have been uncommunicative. Just got back from Northern California. Point Reyes, Big Sur, Asilomar/ Pacific Grove, Carmel Valley, Freemont hinterlands, San Francisco. Better to have been and left than never to have been at all. Maybe one day I’ll be blogging from there. Not soon, but dreaming for now.

    I haven’t actually seen a picture of Faber’s megapiece except the long shot from Google Earth. I’m more of a fan of Banksy’s to tell you the truth. I need messages, dumb intellectual that I almost am.

    Until I saw this video, if you’d said “Faber” to me I would have corrected you, “Ah, but you mean Jean Henri Fabre, the famous naturalist who studied the secret lives of insects and is the only human being known to have empathized with the common wasp!”

    One of said wasps is buzzing around this laptop like mad, and maddeningly, though I’m sitting indoors and the door is open and s/he could certainly have a bit of the late roses and lavender or the last of the kumquat blossoms or the peppermint flowers if s/he had a fraction of the brain of the wonderful busy bee, instead of thinking that a computer, and my computer in particular, could offer sustenance.

    Do you think Faber would say to me “Go crush those wasps”?

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