A family vacation to San Francisco in the 1990s remained in the heart of a young impressionable schoolboy, and those cherished memories are just as vivid today, now that the same young boy has matured into an established artist known as Word to Mother. Born and bred in the quiet seaside town of Hastings, he had little idea of what his future would hold. During the occasional trips to London with his mother, his eyes were opened to world of graffiti, part of a street culture foreign to him and yet he was inexplicably drawn to the bold energy and excitement of the medium as a public expression of discontent and as a way of adding colour to an otherwise negative environment.
His educational background in illustration and his move to the metropolis to become an established graffiti artist paved the way for the next step in his artistic career, that of his acceptance into the competitive world of art. As an urban artist, he remains a sensitive individual who, through his most recent exhibition, California Coming Home, at the White Walls Gallery in San Francisco opens his heart to re-live the memories of the family vacation as a boy, also a reminding him of simpler days, and though this work he passes the message of ‘letting go of the negative energy we collect as we get older’.
The beautiful layered pastel tones of his work spell out the hopes and dreams of a boy through the vision of a man and the constant expectation for a better world. The inclusion of figures are his way of humanizing every situation, spelled out through the symbols and signage of his work, incidentally the first collection painted entirely on canvas rather than the found objects and old wood which he often uses. The closed eyed figures represent the ‘California Dreamers’ of that mythical era. Now living in East London, Word, as his friends call him, remains, in spite of his success, a ‘nice guy’ who wants to make a difference through the positive energy of his art and by his example.
