Welcome to SprogArt

About Me – In The Beginning

My life long love for Graffiti art started when my friend showed me a book he had bought about graffiti in New York called Subway Art by Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper, way back in 1984. It was a book about New York graffiti artists and the beautiful and powerful images they painted on the side of trains. I had never seen anything like it and I knew right away that I wanted to be a graffiti artist myself.

Every graffiti artist needs a tag. I chose Sprog because that was my dads nickname for me when I was born. It turns out I was not the only lad interested in graffiti in my area! I partnered with a friend and together we started creating pieces on walls. We picked locations that we thought would get noticed in and around our area.

At age 13 I created some of my first ever pieces in London, samples of these are below.

About Me – London Life

A year or so later, I started working for my father’s business in Farringdon, near the centre of London. This necessitated taking the tube to work every day. By this time, Graffiti was becoming more and more popular and a lot of graffiti was appearing on trains. Like the authors of the book Subway Art, I decided to take photos of them. This involved getting up extremely early, as once the morning rush hour had subsided London Underground would then take the trains with those pieces out of service to be buffed (cleaned).

Some of the pieces I photographed may have only ran on the side of a train for a few hours. They would then be removed from service to be buffed and lost forever. Little did I know that I was the first person to do this in the UK! As a result, I have a very rare collection of original photographs of around 500 pieces that would otherwise have been forgotten about. I have prints of a select number of pieces for sale within my shop.

About Me – New York Influences

In 1989, I went to New York to visit the birthplace of Hip Hop. This culture comprises of three main elements, which are Graffiti, Rapping and Break Dancing. I was into rap music even before graffiti, so hip hop was already a large part of my life. This is why the pieces I like to create have the same style and feel of New York graffiti.

And now…

Fast forward a few years to today and to create my work on paper I use a mixture of alcohol markers, watercolour markers, colour pencil, posca pens and air brush for surrounding the piece and on the frame itself. On larger pieces I also use acrylic ink and watercolours. For canvas pieces, I use air brush, posca pens and acrylic ink. I like to vary the style of my letters from simple to complicated and from angular to curvy.

I believe a graffiti artist should have many styles in their locker, after all graffiti is about the art of manipulating the letter shapes. My work is what I would call old-school graffiti – the original recipe! It has changed over the years and has many off-shoots from it’s original concept back in the early to mid 70’s.

This is why this style of graffiti has so much energy, movement and vibrancy to it. It is raw and uncut!

When you buy work from me, I would like to think you are not just buying a piece of art, but a piece of hip hop history from someone that genuinely loves the hip hop culture and was there from it’s humble beginnings. Who would have thought all those years ago, just how influential hip hop would be in our society, not just in the art but the way we also talk and dress and look at the world.

Below are a couple of more modern photos, firstly my continued love for hip-hop DJing has partially taken over my lounge. Second and third are pictures of me in my studio, doing exactly what I love.