Street Knowledge. King ADZ

href="http://eelus.com">http://eelus.com

      Eelus is a killer artist who was born in Wigan and has always been fascinated by the darker, weirder side of life. He creates his art on and off the streets, using stencils, spray paint and by hand.

      ‘Ever since I can remember these are the themes that I’ve worked with just because that’s what’s always in my head. Even when I was very young I remember we’d have to draw some kind of dinosaur scene at school, but my dinosaurs would be being ridden around by other-worldly monsters, hunting and eating people. There would be utter carnage on the paper, the kind of shit you see being drawn by disturbed kids in horror films. Then when I was about ten I found a pirate video in the house that my mum had borrowed from someone at work, The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, back to back. So there I was, sat crosslegged on the floor in the dark at around 2 am with headphones on and watched both films one after the other. And so began my love of the dark.’

      He moved to London where his amazing work caught the eye of everyone who likes art. He does his own thing and this sets him apart.

      ‘Like I said earlier, I haven’t grown up being part of a graffiti crew and I’ve only ever stepped on a skateboard once in my life, the fucking thing nearly killed me. I know a lot of artists/writers have a chip on their shoulder about other artists who haven’t grown up “on the street”, but fuck that. I’m not trying to prove anything to anybody but myself and I’m certainly not apologetic for never running around a train yard at 4 am with a skateboard under one arm. To me, street culture is about people and the environment they call home. It’s everything from the yoot on the back of the bus with their shit music pumping from their mobile phones to the Turkish ladies making bread in their shop windows down the Kingsland Road.

      ‘There is no right and wrong with street culture, there’s just people of all walks of life living every day the only way they know how, in the clothes they choose to wear, listening to the music they like, doing the things they like to do. I’ve recently moved to Hastings and the street culture there is similar to that of east London, where I’ve just moved from. There’s quite a young and alternative crowd wearing interesting gear and sweet tattoos, I love it. On the other hand there’s weathered old fishermen with little dogs everywhere drinking by themselves in the quiet local pubs; both are equally as fascinating to me and that to me is street culture.’

      His work has steadily evolved into something special.

      ‘When I first started I used to make small stencils of weird scratchy characters that filled my sketchbooks. From there I practised more and more and got my head around the stencilling process then along came my Shat-at piece which is what really drop-kicked me into the scene properly. From there I did a series of Star Wars themed pieces, a trilogy to go with the original films. These went down well and I was lucky enough to work with Pictures On Walls in making the images into screen prints and get them out to people who wanted them.’

       RON ENGLiSH

       www.popaganda.com

      Ron is America’s most prolific street/pop artist working today, expressing himself through his amazing work both on and off the streets. In 1981 he blew up through his billboard take-overs, subvertising in Dallas, Texas, which, quite rightly, took pot-shots at global brands and their heavy use of advertising. He chose billboards because ‘everyone sees them’. He is one of the founding members of the Culture Jamming movement (>p40) and he questions the ethics of companies such as Apple, McDonald’s, Camel tobacco and Disney through clever re-interpretation of adverts. Back inna day he hand painted the subverts and then pasted them up on billboards; today he uses a large-format printer. But the message is still as sharp and the art as spot-on as it ever was.