What attracted me to graffiti when I was younger was that it annoyed people. When I started art school in the media arts department I made art that was humorous and at times annoying. As a youth I partook in acts of vandalism, I did solo break and enters at fourteen. What eventually happened was that I realised that I didn’t need to just break stuff. I could express myself through art and writing.

Forms of expression can annoy people, look at people criticising biennales or what seems to be a pointless art performance. A lot of art performances are fundamentally about annoying people. The fact is the people making this or that questionable art form don’t care what the general public think. Most people see some form of expression and think it’s all jazz hands. When I really started getting serious about doing more writing in the early 00s I hit a little bit of resistance.

Because I am fundamentally just an amateur at writing I have only had a couple of run-ins with professionals or people who sadly have solid reputations. I guess they were just trying to wake me up because they liked my visual art. It’s like just shut up and make visual art and stop blabbering on about nothing. Writing is both a blessing and a curse in the most cliche ways ever. It has been healing, it helped me while I was recovering from mental trauma.

What amuses me is I have had people declare on a number of occasions that my career in aerosol art is over and I am washed up. Graffiti is even more brutal than some pen pushers. I admit writing has made me look like an idiot on many occasions but I just have to do it. In 2011 as I finally started recovering I started my blog as a way to help me heal. I know most people don’t care what I do, which I appreciate because there are far more interesting things going on.

Yet I occasionally hear of some weak willed type twisting my words and spreading rumours. I guess that is it, if you are in the public realm you gotta deal with many variables. Yet writing this right now is very healing and makes me feel great. The most (to quote the wise words of Spanian) ‘savage’ part of writing is it goes into your mind. It crosses that boundary. No wonder people get annoyed because you gotta deal in your face with something that is uncool, embarrassing, stupid or whatever.

My answer is get over it and secretly offload to your therapist or drug dealer or whoever is paid to care. I can’t afford therapy and most people just ignore what I do anyway. At least on some level if I am annoying someone I am doing my job as an artist. Criticism is a good thing and I do appreciate it but it was more aimed at not being too ‘Current Affairs’ and emotive. I always wanted my aerosol art to have emotion in it and writing is a bit easier in that regard.

To conclude, being a major failure has its positives, in that I am not surrounded by people who care about their image and want to have friends that match their lifestyle rather than live in reality. What is reality anyway? There are positives and negatives with everything and writing has been such a great tool to help rebuild pathways in my brain and I am glad I have published some books. I am mostly happy being creative and I always look up to poets like Rick Holland and I love it. I love a great challenge.