Fanakapan Collection
Fanakapan
You used to be a decent skater back in the day. Does your interest in skateboarding affect your creative aspirations in a way?
Spray-painting ballons with aerosol cans on the street was a complete exorcism and I just kind of rolled with it. In my friendship groups and the way that I thought and looked at the world, I’d look at the world as a skateboarder and a painter. I’d see a wall I wanted to paint and I’d see a ledge I wanted to grind. It went hand in hand for a while.
Why and when did balloon art become your signature style?
Balloons just happened to be quite an easy way in, teaching myself characters, shapes shading, colors. Balloons are just natural. I enjoyed teaching myself how to use a spray can and my style became sort of naturally 3D because of my sculptural background.
You’ve created a lot of big murals around the world. How does the location influence what you create? Is your head full of ideas you want to create or does the location come in first, and then something new pops in?
Location sometimes is a big part of my idea. It depends if I have to reflect my environment with what I intend to paint. Or I might just throw something that’s quite enjoyable to look at, makes people smile. That type of thing.
Which part of the creative process do you enjoy the most?
The part of my creative process that I enjoy the most is very loose sketch I put up in the early moments of sketching out a piece on the street because you can see people confused. I like the confusion and yeah, I like to kind of keep people guessing. The longer I spend on a sketch, the tighter I get. That confusion, public spaces, turns into kind of like wonder I suppose. And they start to see this piece come to life.
It could only take sometimes like half an hour before you’ve made an image that people recognize. And I think that’s still my most enjoyable part of the process.
A mural can take a lot of hours to create, but you’ll never know how long it will last. I can be sprayed over, tagged over or painted back to its original state. How do you paint up to that feeling, knowing that your art may not last forever?
You have to get used to the fact that the artwork you put out there, is definitely not permanent. They come and go. The enjoyment is just laying out there and enjoying the process of putting out in the public domain.
What kind of a legacy do you hope you will leave behind?
I’d be flattered if in the future somebody would take the time to look back into my artistic life like I did at art college.
People do use me at the moment for their University projects and stuff like that which is great. I never ever imagined that would happen. That I’d be the subject of somebody’s study.