JAMES AND KARLA MURRAY PHOTOGRAPHY

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School yourself on the city you love through such Gotham-centric tomes as Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York ($65) and New York’s Unique & Unexpected Places ($25). Mention TONY for 30 percent off on staff picks through February 28. 686 Fulton St at South Portland Ave (718-246-0200, greenlightbookstore.com)
Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/shopping/83007/10-things-we-love-about-fultonstreet#ixzz0gBYqUnRm

BATES,COPE2,T-KID 170, EWOK ONE 5MH,GOAL,JAES

One thing I don’t like about graffiti anymore is that there are too many writers with names that have already been done, that people have had already.  It’s like there’s no respect anymore in that sense.  I mean, if you know a dude’s wrote that before you, you shouldn’t write it just out of respect. COPE2

EWOKONE 5MH,SIME, ULTRA,YEAR,JEDI,RIME

COPE2,T-KID170,LOMMIT,SEEN,CES,FLITE, PULSE,COPE2,KAWS,WESTONE(FC),DAZE

Illegal Graffiti

(Illegal Graffiti) TAK,YES2;KINGBEE, VASE;YES2,CES; CES,KENT,YES2

top:COPE2,ESPO bottom:WANE(COD),COPE2,DELTA2,NEED,T-KID170

The piece that I did with COPE that says Coney Island baby… well, I basically got a call from COPE, and you know I can’t overstate the fact of who COPE is in the community and what he represents in the community.  COPE really is gonna be recognized as one of the greatest in whatever category you want to put him in.  He’s definitely one of the all-time greatest that we have.  And COPE called me up one morning and said, “You know, I gotta spot.  Come and paint this spot.” There’s never any notice.  It’s always, you know, be here now because other people have fronted and I want to put you on the wall.  And I didn’t front.  I got like a few cans together and I ran up there.  And of course, what was represented to me on the phone and what it actually was were two totally different things.  I thought I was gonna gain some little piece of a wall and it ended up being a fairly big spot.  And I was short on cans and I was trying to do something fast and simple and COPE wasn’t having it.  He said, “No, I want you to blaze this spot.  You gotta do somethin’ really fresh, blah, blah, blah.”  And he did his best to motivate me and I fronted and said, “Look, I don’t have any cans and I’ve only got these cans right here.”  And he says, “Oh, a brand new hardware store opened up down the block.  It’s a rack,”…you know, one 30 year old telling another 30 year old man that there’s a paint rack down the street is pretty ridiculous, but so it is.  And I went down the street and got a few cans and came back.  And that piece is what happened.  You know, just like the perfect example of reluctance being overcome by enthusiasm and exuberance on COPE’s behalf and something great happening out of that.  I mean, I had a little sketch originally… but if you saw the sketch, it looked nothing like the finished product.  And you know, spontaneity, spontaneous combustion always wins.  Always you know, 999 times out of a thousand, beats the most rigorous specific planning. ESPO

http://blackflagshoppe.blogspot.com/2010/02/broken-windows-graffiti-nyc.html

http://www.thesource.com/articles/6866/Broken-Windows/

Thanks ROYCE BANNON!

DOÑA, LADY PINK

Back in the 80’s, graffiti was loose.  It was a rebellious movement.  People didn’t pay for their paint.  People didn’t pay for their film.  There were no bars on the display gates.  There was no such thing as a store where you had to be over eighteen to get spray paint.  Dudes would rack paint and then chill out and wait to catch an easy victim and vamp their paint.  Graffiti was a poor man’s thing.  You know… everybody had to steal or rob because paint cost money.  Portfolios cost money.  Supplies cost money.  Markers cost money.  Even good drawing paper costs money.  So everything costs money and that’s why everyone was either stealing or robbing one another in the process. {SHARE 37

GOAL,SABE,TIWS (Illegal Graff)

OVIE, JAES,YES2,SEEMSO,CAN2,SEEN,CES (Illegal Graff)

It’s all about fame-is the way I look at graffiti.  I mean everything that I do in my life is related to graffiti, otherwise I don’t do it.  In this world you have to stay on top, otherwise you’ll be forgotten.  I happen to be one of the lucky ones.  I wasn’t the first graffiti artist in the world and I know I’m not gonna be the last, but my name travels around the world.  And I can honestly say, without tooting my own horn, that I am the world’s most famous graffiti artist that people recognize throughout the world.  It ain’t easy keeping that because there’s a lot of things you’ve got to do and keeping it real and getting up and still staying out there.  You can’t just quit and say, okay well that’s who I was.  It’s not like that, there’s a reputation to uphold.  So I’ve got to continue getting my name out there.  You know, you gotta be in it to win it.  Just like Lotto. {SEEN

T-KID 170

Back in the days of the trains, the whole thing was about getting your name up- it was about fame.  It wasn’t so much about big productions, it was about putting your name on the train and a lot of them.  For me, it was putting your name on the train with style.  It was about the style of letters.  I wanted to do it with style.  I wanted to be recognized as a kid that could burn.  That’s what I wanted to do.  I didn’t want to just bomb and do throw-ups.  I mean, yeah, I did a little bit of that and I kinged lines on the insides.  The #1 line, three years in a row I kept kinging because I was always there anyway painting whole cars and stuff.  But it wasn’t just about that for me.  It was more about the style and doing something nice, and I became famous for that.  {T-KID 170

COPE2,DELTA2,TRAP,Characters by EWOK ONE 5MH

When I go to paint a wall, I bring like 2 crates of all different colors.  When I get to the wall, I look at what’s in the crate and I just take what looks good and use it.  Whatever outline comes out my head as I’m doing it, I just do it.  That’s it.  It’s very simple.  People say to me, “Yo, if you sat down and sketched you’d be awesome”, which I know I could, but I don’t stress that.  People sleep on me man.  I can burn too.  I can get loose.  I got my own style.  I always do my pieces right out  my head.  {COPE2
BROKEN WINDOWS: Graffiti NYC 2009 Reprint. 70 more pages. Hardcover.

http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Windows-Graffiti-James-Murray/dp/1584233761/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258417292&sr=1-4

http://www.doobybrain.com/2010/02/09/review-broken-windows-graffiti-nyc-by-james-t-karla-l-murray/

I can’t believe people nowadays how they all buy their paint.  Back in the days of moving steel, if you bought your paint other writers would consider you a sucker. And they would be the first ones stealing it from you. In the 1980’s, I was out in San Francisco with some writers who were talking amongst themselves on how they found this store that had clover green paint and they couldn’t wait to the end of the week to have money to go to the store and buy this paint.  That was my first time of finding out that writers were buying their paint and I looked at them and said, “What do you mean you’re buying your paint”.  I mean 20 cans on a whole top to bottom in Rustoleum to do a whole car, you’re talking $100 worth of paint.  Who the hell had $100 to buy paint and besides you just didn’t do it.  I mean everything down to the film you used was racked.  At that time, you even had the free mail-away packs at the supermarket where you would rack the film along with the free mail-away and get it developed for nothing too.  We racked everything.  An old time writer even wrote an article about how when you went to go get lunch, you didn’t buy lunch.  This is what it was all about back then, you know you’re hanging out with four guys… And you’d decide who’s in charge of racking the Italian bread and who’s in charge of racking the salami, cheese and ham and who’s in charge of the mayonnaise and the mustard and sodas.  Then when you came out of the store, you all got together on the bench across the street, pulled everything out, laid it out and made your sandwiches while watching the trains go by and snapping your pictures.  Today the world of buying paint, I still can’t get over it because where I was from it was a LAW.  In the graffiti world, it was a law that you did not buy your paint.  {SEEN interview in BROKEN WINDOWS

BROKEN WINDOWS: Graffiti NYC 2009 Reprint. 70 more pages. Hardcover.

http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Windows-Graffiti-James-Murray/dp/1584233761/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258417292&sr=1-4

BROKEN WINDOWS: Graffiti NYC Pages 12-13 EAZ PER ONE (Characters by EAZ)

BROKEN WINDOWS: Graffiti NYC Pages 14-15 RATH, VASE, JEW, KERZ, KINGBEE, DEKAE

I use fat caps in many of my pieces, but I come so close and fast to the wall, that it makes the line look skinny.  It’s all in the technique.  There are a handful of neat writers out there.  Me and CES are neat writers.  We are perfectionists.  We’re not satisfied until the line is correct, so we spend more time on our pieces.  {KING BEE

In the production, Urban Wasteland, we were trying to doing something big and original.  We decided to paint a landscape representing an atomic explosion of caps.  It was how N.Y. just blew up with graffiti after an atomic bomb went off.  There’s a lot of detailed work in it.  We painted for like 4 days and used over $1,000 worth of Krylon.  Me and DEKAE painted most of the spray caps, switching off from one color to the other.  I had some problems with the neighborhood church members while painting the characters because they thought they looked too violent.  A week or so before we painted the wall, somebody in the neighborhood got murdered, and the church guy came by and said here’s this evil character popping out just after the murder and that there are always bad images appearing when murders take place.  He said the character was like some kind of omen and even more bad shit would happen if it stayed.  He said he would pay me to get rid of it.  I was already painting for 3 days straight and I was exhausted, but I finally agreed to change the character.  He was supposed to be a king of original street style with an evil face, holding a skeleton cup, an undertaker of style.  I ended up toning down his eyes and giving him a less wicked hair cut.  We all suffered with this wall, it was a nightmare.
{VASE

BROKEN WINDOWS: Graffiti NYC Page 24-25 CES, EAZ, KERZ, YES2, PER ONE

I did maybe 3 or 4 trains when trains were still painted like full-on painted, destroyed, not like they are today.  I was a little guy so I remember going and I didn’t have the great knowledge of what was good paint and what was bad paint.  I had some cheaper Touch and Tone paint and I had no knowledge of caps, so I did a CES 1 script letter and I couldn’t even reach the windows.  I was standing on the wood on the rail with a milk crate on it, and I still couldn’t reach it. The train ran, came back and it was destroyed with throw-ups all over it.  I didn’t even get a picture of it.  So I went back again and did some other nonsense, but I remember giving so much credit in my head to writer’s who painted on trains so neat because prior to painting on a train all I did was walls.  And the train of course is a different surface.  It’s slick and you can’t hit it like you can hit a wall.  I remember my paint just going whoosh… all down the side with horrible drips all over the place.  Between the cheap paint and the surface, I couldn’t put two and two together and I was still learning. But then to find out it was the paint, it was the caps, it was this, it was that and that you had to acquire all these little tools to make your work look good.  No one told me anything.  I pretty much found it all out for myself.  Actually how I found out was there was a hobby shop that I used to take paint from that had these little cans with really nice colors called
Testors.  I went in there one day and filled my bag full of those little cans of paint, not knowing, thinking paint is paint.  Those little cans looked cool and they had caps on them that wrote really neat.  Like if both ends weren’t blown out, it wrote in a perfect line.  The paint somehow seemed thicker and I thought it was only those little cans that did that.  Then I took the caps off and put them onto a Rustoleum and a Krylon can and I got the same effect. I was saying, “Shit, look what the hell I discovered here.” It took me some time to find out about fat caps and stuff but I was happy using just that Testor cap because that’s what I learned. I thought I had discovered it.  You know, I gotta be honest with you, I thought I did.  Nobody told me don’t use this, use that. Nobody told me nothing. {CES

BROKEN WINDOWS: Graffiti NYC 2009 Reprint. 70 more pages. Hardcover.

http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Windows-Graffiti-James-Murray/dp/1584233761/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258417292&sr=1-4