HAPPY NEW YEAR 2013

ASHWAN

Paint...

'Wil o' tha Wisp' 

'The Light'

'Fire'

'Love of My Life'

'Things Fall apart'

'Industry Rule 4080'

'Mister Boogieman'

untitled

DJ RED ALERT kiss fm FINAL MIX!

One of the true pioneer dj's. a real legend and fundamental founder of hip hop. ashwan

Roland TR 808 drum machine

BOOOM! ashwan

WRECKING CREW ORCHESTRA...DANCE

sometimes with the internet it amazes me how slow things come to you...this is DOPE! live 'animated' dance. the lid has been lifted on this one! Ash

Robert Glasper Remix by Ashwan

Three Kings High

Three Kings High.... new group from the man CHATTERBOX. Chatterbox is a guy myself and London Spoken Word guru Curious have done a few cuts with...most notoriously 'Digital Data', which made it onto a few mix tapes a while back. been promising to get a blog done about these guys in a while. Until I get around to it proper, here is a taster. ENJOY! Ashwan

SWEET- Common

sweet

REMINISCE

wow, what a couple of days....lost Smokin Joe Frazier AND Heavy D. Both before they deserved to go. RIP guys....

Scribble Wall..Ashwan art, blast from the past

BLAST FROM THE PAST:

I was diggin in the image crates recently with a mentor and friend and came across this photo. It is a shot of one of my early 'scribble' walls, worked on in the late 90's while at the Art Institute of Chicago. It is about 12ft wide. These things had a real physical presence. They literally were walls. This one originally had speakers inside that played back the sounds that had been made during the construction process. I eventually left these out though as it really didn't add anything. The sounds went on to become independent pieces in their own right, unfortunately captured on DAT tape... who has DAT these days????

peace.

Parisian battle of the Post-It's

This is GREAT. I spotted this in The Guardian today, who got their images from http://www.postitwar.com/


Paris is in the midst of a Post It note battle! Not got a lot to say about it except that I think it has a little bit of the infectiousness of early NY graffiti. People seeing it and wanting to try their own versions, BUT I also think it's interesting that the medium AND the subject matter really reflect our times in a very interesting way. It is all very quick and disposable and the images used do not carry any great meaning, other than the fundamental act of creating them in the first place...which carries tonnes of meaning!
I also think it is funny that a lot of these are made while people are working and I think it genuinely reflects the nature of a lot of mundane jobs today. People cannot focus on them for any length of time as they seem so trivial and do not carry any voice of the people doing them, therefore you get a lot of coffee machine banter and this type of mischief where some kind of self as a social animal can come out. That's not a criticism I think it's great. I love these and now I feel like going and buying a bunch of post-it notes.
Other thing to state is: How creative are these Parisians!?! Props to that. What a great city.













Maybe I'll do a Post It note version of one of my paintings...
Ashwan

The Cypher pt.i

Circles have been featuring in my studio recently. Not sure how far they are going, but I needed to try a few. Even with my square canvases I am always rotating them while I am painting. I guess something inside me feels like a record is inside each of the squares, like they're big sleeves or something.
So here is one I rolled out (literally)the other day.
Called The Cypher pt.i it is Acrylic and mixed media on canvas and measures 96cm in diameter x 10cm thick.
I didn't use any text on this as it is more of an instrumental idea. I wanted to capture some of the feel of the tunes we'd b-boy to back in the 80's, that futuristic cosmo-funk. NUNK, NUNK AIN'T NO PUNK, EVERBODY ROCK TO THE NEW WAVE FUNK.










Hopefully listening to those should give you an idea of where I was going with this one.

PEACE, UNITY, LUV and HAVING FUN!
ashwan

RIP Kase 2

I just heard on Twitter that Kase2/Case2 has passed away. All old skool heads will remember him from the Style Wars documentary runnin his mouth at the writers bench and droppin lines from The Message. The crazy cat with just one arm, who somehow managed to produce beautiful art while hanging on the side of a subway car in the middle of the night.
RIP Kase 2...an inspiration.

POP LOCK- COLD BONE

ILL!

ASHWAN

Cheshire Life Article, June 2011

Spotted this recently in a journal from the UK.
Often when paintings go out into the world, I have no idea where they end up or who bought them. For me this is a really important part of the process and I never have any fear or regret about letting pieces go; it is a part of their life-cycle. It is good to see one of the pieces I regard as personal favourite end up in a good home.
Also got a few good lines on the following page. Check them out below:


Purple Pond, 5ftx5ft. Oil on canvas


I believe this collector also picked up these pieces.


Super Duper Star, 2ftx2ft. Oil and mixed media on canvas

Busiest Rhymes, 8ftx3.5ft. oil and mixed on canvas

Ashwan

VIZIE van graffiti

Artist Driven - Vizie Night from LRG on Vimeo.

legal piece made to look more dramatic to sell LRG t shirts and Ironlak shtuff...nice piece though.
ashwan

RECORD (vinyl) ART

It was sad news recently when I learned of the passing of a great artist...No, not Lucian Freud (who was a decent painter)or Amy Winehouse (who was a very young, decent singer)but the less recognised Alex Steinweiss who was art director for Colombia records from 1938.
The reason that the old LP record was called an album is that they literally used to be produced like a traditional photo album, with a leather effect cover, gold inlays and pages and pages of information. Alex went into Colombia with the idea that if you made records more visually appealing and dynamic, then you would attract more people and therefore sell more. His first album cover, and effectively the first illustrated record cover in history, is a stunner and way before it's time visually:




The influence of Walker Evans 'Broadway' photograph (below)is evident, but to apply it to the context of product packaging at this time was visionary. It is not surprising that this early Rodgers and Hart cover should prove to be so inspirational.

RIP Alex Steinweiss (March 24, 1917 – July 18, 2011)


Walker Evans 'Broadway', 1930

LAMBORGHINI AVENTADOR - A Fly Whip

Pete Rock/Smiff n Wessun

Delta in Switzerland.

It's essential for graffiti and writers to evolve if the roots of the culture are going to continue to carry meaning in society today. Most writers have been inspired to do what they do by a dynamic that they saw in the work of artists in NYC in the 80's and early 90's. When I look at Dutch artist DELTA's (aka Boris Tellegen) work it takes me back to scouring the pages of Henry Chalfants 'Subway Art'. I see a kid staring at a piece by Kase 2, trying to understand the intricacy, the computer rock craziness that Kase brought to the world. I can see how the scale of images that Henry brought us in their intimacy would cause a then young and aspiring writer to desire to turn them into macro versions of themselves.
Graffiti art holds a difficult place in art history, even now with major shows cropping up internationally. It is still hard for historians to see, and many writers to articulate, exactly where the relevance is, how it all fits in.
One of the things graffiti did (because it was not 'hi' painting) is take the sculpture off the floor and put it on to the wall. Anthony Caro took it off the plinth and that was considered revolutionary. Graff writers made it two dimensional so you didn't need to fall over that shit while you were looking at the paintings.
Graffiti took graphic languages and experimented with 3 dimensions on a 2d plane on a scale that had never really been toyed with. Of course Trompe L'oil existed already for hundreds of years and even artists such as Richard Haas were dealing with it on an architectural scale, but much of early graffiti was 'sculpture'.
Look at the work of Zaha Hadid and that of Daim and see in a slightly different way, what I am talking about.

When I look at Delta's work in these images, I see things that I saw when I stared at that 'Subway Art' for hours on end in the mid 80's. The dynamic was incredible. COMPUTER ROCK!
Graffiti has done MANY things for the future art history books, this is just one of them.

The show is at the Kunstraum until September 10th, 2011.
for more info visit http://kunstraum.ch/
images stolen from ARRESTED MOTION

PEACE,
ASHWAN