Moving to Europe was a naive choice filled with great people.  People make their own choices and heroin had made a lot of my American friends a bit detached, so I started moving.  I tried to live in New York City until one morning I saw up to fifteen business types running back and forth on the Pier to get rid of something, maybe life.  I liked the slow ways, moving up and down ancient streets that get you nowhere so I moved to Europe.  Paris seemed sweet from all the art books but the Sleazy Counts counting little boys made me cringe and seemed to rule the art scene or at least bring it under bridges and ask for weird favors.  In this period I started doing weird art stuff in the street, I was sewing and using pieces of advertising stickers to make collages that I would tape to the metro floors to get the Urban footprint.  All this work was just to be there, the internet wasn’t around to take it home, no photos, and no digital camera.

No rent money brought me to Italy where I painted oil paintings and slept on a beautiful studio floor, a place where 9 artists brought their creations and cheated on their wives.  There was a view of a cathedral from these huge windows and three mid-evil towers reminded you that the folly of man ain’t nothing new.  In the middle Ages noble Italian families built huge brick towers just to prove their wealth.  The city I was living in was known as the city of a thousand towers until most fell down, it was 1999 and there were about 6 or 7 still up.

I got up a lot in this city.  I started painting huge angels around town with a brush and roller tied to a fishing pole, this stuff got noticed and the mayor decided to give me the castle to hold my art show in and make me stop painting it on the street.  He said I was a symbol of understanding, the local graf guys didn’t understand.  I got the shit kicked out of me under another bridge.  This made me think how big an institution the arts and graffiti had become.  I got accepted by one and punished by another, all the same station, same fist, pretty boring.  I couldn’t move the night I got beat and ended up on a couch in another city, drinking whiskey for the muscles and watching some bullshit television show that made “normal” people “famous.” 

This is everything or just a particular.  In this particular city of Milan, a bigger place with more measures and media, a place with a strong cultural presence that was also getting beat by the hand of institution and sponsorship, but not under bridges.  We got beat in Museums, our Street Art got itself caught up in some interests that we couldn’t really explain.   It’s interesting to reflect on the networking and collaborative forces that we admitted to rather than committed to.  The internet mania ended a lot of great parties and participation but also got us moving, got us invited all over Europe to make crazy paintings and sometimes talk about it as if it was a huge tower, our mid-evil tower of power, our Street Art phenomenon!

At this point I moved to Naples where Street Art is still the dumbest thing you could ever do, “they pay you for that?” is the most attention I’ve gotten so far.  I know we are in a unique era, and attention is hard to keep in just one area.  I know we like to bitch and moan about specific areas but if you have a computer and a camera you can be anywhere, make animations, make a song, do pretty much what thousands of men had worked so hard for.  I think this is the strength of any artist, the application of his or her background.  A background  that does not involve the foamy layer of life trying to run up and down the Pier or the scene to lose itself in icons.  The rebel artist or the vandal could very well be a bunch of assholes that beat you worse than the cops.  Europe could be a highly decorated nest of racist old people complaining, New York could be the capital of art or frustration, or both!   All this stuff is part of a unique pushing and dreaming that is never the same, the world ends and begins every second, so it’s best to let it go on. 

I am now on some European You Tube trip, making stop motion animations to try and further explain a pittoric point of view.  It is really nice to see drawings move, it’s very much like a brush stroke or some freestyle poem, I recommend it to anyone, I also recommend seeing Europe as a choice of thought, a process that is closer to life experience and less intent on it’s strict organization.  For some, life is the choice of food and the length of a day.  I think this is the best way to explain Europe and it’s many relics of civilization.  Other reminders are more monumental and can also allude to the fact that the Church really did a number on these folks.  These simple moves and candor even made it to the New World to burn their witches and demons.  So Europe is also extremely tied to some backward thinking.  Thinking that gives nothing to woman and everything to a concept of death, so present in life, that everyday seems like a lesson in its dark presence. 

We were painting in broad daylight however, the other day on the side of a contemporary art museum housed inside the ancient queens residence, and this old curved man came by with his bag of fruit and stopped to see what these three young me were drawing with an old ketchup bucket full of red paint and a shitty fishing pole to paint higher.  He said, “ It looks like mortality!” Whether this means that our painting was a symbol of life or death for this old man, we really couldn’t tell, he walked off with his bag of apricots and we kept on painting.