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They say that Birmingham is the Heart of England. And we believe that art is the heart of the city. Art is what spins the world. Life IS art. It is everywhere. The way you stretch in the morning, the way drink your cup of tea, the way you speak, the way you feel, the way you dress, what you believe in, it is there. That is why we are offering a short tour, our point of view to see a small part of art that is in the city we live now – Birmingham.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Content GraffitiInterview. Joshua BillinghamIkonStudiosInterview. Paul Michael LagfordThe Public

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How did you get into graffitiing?

About 13 years ago, I was always into drawing from an early age like a lot of kids, but when I was about 14 / 15 I found a bunch of old graffiti sketches of my brothers from the 80’s that my mum had kept in the loft. It all sort of started from there, I would copy the lettering trying to understand how they worked and coloured them in different ways and I would add characters on to the side of them. I didn’t really know what I was doing back then the only examples of graffiti I had were these sketches my brother had left behind, back then we didn’t the internet so I didn’t have access to what was going on with graffiti in the rest of the world or even out side of B irmingham. For a wile a just spent my time sketching on paper or tagging the busses on the way to and from school with big marker pens on my own, I didn’t know anyone else that was doing it as no one at my school was into it.

It wasn’t until I met the brother of one of my girlfriends friends that I started to meet other writers, he went to a school on the other side of Birmingham and quite a few of his mates were into it, we all soon became good friends and would meet up all the time to sketch and just hang out, on the week ends we would go to selly oak basketball park as it was a legal place for people to paint, and had been there since the 80’s, it was well known around the world as a good spot to paint and we would get writers from every country painting there.

By Choy Ting Law

“I didn’t really know what I was doing back then”

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That was my first experience of real qual-ity graffiti, Sellyoak park became like a mecca to us, we would go down in our group of friends and we would meet up with other kids our age from all round the city that were also into graffiti, we’d watch all the older writers paint, and take sketch books so we could sketch together and draw each other outlines and compare styles, it was a great place to make friends and to be as a kid into graffiti, I learnt alot from spending time there. (Unfortunate-ly Selly oak sort of faded away and was made illegal to paint about two years ago it is now just abit of a shit tip with all the life gone from it.)

Through talking to the older writers and amongst our selves, I found out what

of colours, some days we would go fur-ther afield and get on the train as far as we could go before we got caught by the ticket man and chucked of the train, then we would go round the shops in that area. We got quite good at it the once we got about 40 cans at once from the same shop in digbeth.

After acquiring enough paint we would then split it and go and find places we could paint with less chance of getting chased away from, or we’d try and paint as close to a main road at night as possi-

spray paint I should be using with what nozzles and what shops sold it, and also good spots to paint around Birmingham. It was then that I started learning how spray paint worked and how to use it, I’d either go on my own or we would go in groups to places like B&Q, Home base, Halfords, Motor world, Fletchers and any other shops to steal spray paint, we were young and didn’t have alot of money to pay for paint. We would spend whole days on the busses going round the hole of Birmingham to look for paint shops that we had heard were there and easy to steal from or were good for getting chrome paint from or had a good range

ble so every one could see it we would do this as often as possible, I’d some times go on my lunch break from school to Motor world on the high street steal some cans of paint and get some chips then either pop down to the train bride by school or the car park round the back of what was then tops tiles do abit of painting and eat chips then go back to school and spend the rest of the day sketching in the back of my books thinking about painting graffiti, it became a massive addiction for me.Every thing about graffiti attracted me to it; I was creative illegal and a great way to make close friends.

“it became a massive addiction for me.”

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Elaborate the whole Toy Fighter/Forty Eight crew story and how did it start?FORTY EIGHT/48 is the name of my crew, every group of writers has a crew, its a select group that you want to share a name with and want to paint with, every writer can be in more than one crew, the crews I’m in are ID a London based crew FKS one of the oldest and prolific Birmingham based crews and of course 48 Crew, 48 CREW is my crew as I created it back in 2004, The people in the crew were asked to join based on how they paint and how close we are as friends. TOY FIGHTER is an anagram of FORTY-EIGHT, The word TOY is relevant to graffiti as it is the term used to de-scribe the non-desirable members of the graffiti community. FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING SEE THE VIDEO. WHAT IS A TOY? www.thegent48.blogspot.com

“every group of writers has a crew, its a select group that you want to share a name with and want to paint with”

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Who would you say influenced you at the start?At the start my main influences came from selly-oak it was the best place for inspiration and information for me, and also older writers like KORSA, CREM, ZUKI, CRIZE, MEFO, MENZ, ATISKY, BITS, ROME, FKS CREW (that I was asked to be apart of) SSM CREW (also asked to join), UBA CREW, And also at that time all of my friends and the people I met and the experiences I had. For style of graffiti it’s was tradi-tional New York graffiti.

What are you trying to communicate through your pieces?The thing about graffiti is that its just about the author its just about promoting your name and communicating to other writers that you have a fresher style than them, that’s what my graffiti communicates, I’m not sure what it communicates to

the average joe on the street, that’s graffiti that’s the way its always been since it was created. That’s why I think people don’t like it as its purest form; it’s not for them, it never has been. it’s for us. I think its all changing though, what with the attention on street art, There’s a massive differ-ence between street art and graffiti and also the type of people that do them, I think people not in the know get it confused alot.

“it was the best place for inspiration”

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IKON

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9-11-2011 (2011)

“ It was that wild flower meadow that got me going..”

Paul LangfordThe studio next door..By Gabor Kovacs

When I first entered my new studio space in the Jubilee centre in Birmingham, Paul Langford greeted me with a warm smile as his new “neighbour” and showed me around in the building. He looked at my work, gave me some advice and went on his way. When I decided to find Birmingham artists to interview for The Heart of Birmingham, I did not hesitate to ask him to tell me about his life, art and career. We decided to take the interview in his studio where we would be surrounded with his work. Over that hour Paul Langford proved to be friendly, wise, philo-sophical and open to any questions.

Tell me about yourself. How did you start your career?I was born in 1950 in Winston Green, Birmingham. That makes me 61 years old now. I was an art man right from the start. My mum was a very crea-tive person; my dad was a manufac-turing jeweller. He designed his own designs. Perhaps it comes from the genes of my parents.I was always drawing as a kid. But my parents broke up as I was 15. So I had to get a job, and back in 1965, jobs in art weren’t considered proper jobs. My first job was cutting carpets but very quickly the company I worked for realised I am better off on the retail floor. Within a couple of years I was a window dresser where I could use my artistic side. At that time Frank Smith was the best window

dresser who won the world award 11 consecutive years, so I had really good training. That was fantastic, I really enjoyed the job but the money was lousy, so I went back to the furnishing store where I started and had a job as an assistant fabric buyer and soft fur-nishing manager.From there I did 6 months stunt which at that time was THE place to buy furnishing. Terence Conran was just a rising star so furnishing was becoming very important. So I did excessive jobs, and I did classes at night school for painting. And I was painting in a hobby sort of way. And then I bought my first horse. In regards to the art side it was fatal as the next 30 years I spent all my money on horses.

“ It was that wild flower meadow that got me going..”

I was getting better and better jobs to finance my horses. But may have been for a purpose because my degree in fine art, which I received when I was 57 years old was majored around horse sculp-tures. So obviously having horses was an influence, as I had a true passion about it.So I’ve got the horses out of my system now and the art is very much back in my system.I sold a few paintings to family and friends, friend of friends and haven’t really painted for 28 years, but in millennium, the year 2000, which was the international year of the artists, I thought that was a good time to start again. July that year I was in a garden centre way out of the country where they planted 5 acres of land as a wild flower meadow for the millennium.

I had a walk around there and in the very next day I had to paint. I virtually painted every day since. And it was that wild flower meadow that got me going.It is really quiet strange, that I will be having an open studio in the next couple of weeks, called the “Landscapes 2011”. I had my first exhibition called landscape 2001. So I’ve got a decade of painting of the landscape; particularly meadows and floral things.What is your favourite subject to paint?It is really quiet strange, that I will be having an open studio in the next couple of weeks, called the “Landscapes 2011”. I had my first exhibition called landscape 2001. So I’ve got a decade of painting of the landscape; particularly meadows and floral things.I never put a figure on any of my work. I want the meadow to be a sort of port hall into another world for people. And the viewer can only image. You will not look at somebody else’s life, somebody picking flowers or walking the kids, or the dogs. But very solitary 20

I can’t imagine my life without painting..

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things, it can be used as a tool of meditation. For the viewers to look at their own lives disappearing to the world, use it as a tool for contempla-tion however they want. When they come home and they had a very shit day, and they sit down, it is a port hall into another world.I am very optimistic; my pictures aren’t pessimistic in any way. I believe in the value of man, the world and how wonderful nature is when people can get outside.Looking at nature, a lot of our answers we can find in nature. That’s what I’m about. I know it is really old fashioned to this traditional type of painting but I thing a painting can be as intellectual as a 500 pages book or whatever.Who inspires you?Influences, I would definitely say Monet, Van Gough and Turner. I have many other influences but those are the foundation blocks. I do not try to copy their style or work, but I can see those three influences in all my work.I love colour, you can say I’m a colour-ist and I like texture. That was from working with fabrics and furnishings. I can’t imagine my life without paint-ing.

To your opinion what role does the artist have in society?The artist - this is just a personal view - is very important member of society. I see the artist rightly or wrongly, and people just laugh when I say this, but I believe the art is the last area where we should be dealing with truth and love.To develop your visual language suf-ficiently and to get your own ideas out there, I think that is what an artist is about. I think art can be truthful. People do not really like to stomach what they see but if you can engage with the viewer and get your ideas out there and if you can question the percep-tions of life and perception of things I don’t think it is a bad thing. I only came to a degree which made me think outside the box, but honestly, I never been in the box. I don’t belong in the box. I would be quite happy

curling up in the corner of the box but I never ever been in a box in my life. I don’t know if other artist feel this or not, but to be outside society although you’re part of it and looking as an ob-server what’s going on. So perhaps by being brought up in the 50s and being a teenager in the 60s it was all about being an individual, I find the ways things are now interesting. Everybody wants sort of the same. Everybody wants to wear the same clothes or recognise those shoes or the current labels, where in my day, the fact that you had something on that no one else had got that was fantastic. But people have this great fashion snob-bery, not just with clothes but cars and the house you live in. But I don’t let where I live define who I am as a hu-man being.

The British public are more sophisti-cated than we give them credit for. You give something with full of love and truth and say, there you go, what you think of this? Some will get it, some wont, some will like it, some won’t, and that brings me to another point in regards of art.Once you made a piece of work and you put it out into the public domain you have no control over it, whatever that person standing in front of your art. Their phenomenology kicks in.The experience they had in their life whatever that may be, looking at the work of art. Whether they get it or not, I find that really interesting, and I think that phenomenology, how we experience things. I can look at build-ings and cry. the material is immune with a sort of emotion and essence. That is what I am trying to do with my own work. They are much better painters that are more technickly ad-here than me but I do things truthful-ly, and I try to give people the essence of what is want to say. And by this real

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Granny Takes a trip (2011)

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peculated essence what I want to get out there hopefully people will appre-ciate. But it is not the end of the world if they don’t get it.Do you have any words of advice for young artists?

Have a work ethic. Do the work; treat it as a full time job. That is the one big thing. Go on the journey, be creative all the time. If its only the cup of coffee on the back of the fag pocket. That will take you on the journey. Some things are going to work, some aren’t. But you will learn from that experimentation. I see a lot of contemporary artists and this is the way they work, and we all work differently. They do a lot of thinking. They get what I call intellectual constipation. So when they come to ship the work out, they are unable to do it. They thought that much, so many angles that spark that landed on their shoulder to create something and was probably a really good idea. They analysed it and watered it down so it becomes impotent, it is only a part of what it could have been if they have started it. With art you should believing and breathing it. Have a real work ethic, visit art galleries, research, work on sculptures, paintings. As a young art-ist I would suggest keep experimenting. Do not try to get your own style, there is a danger you will pigeon-hall yourself. Be truthful and understand yourself.And the most important thing is to have a big life. Travel, interact with other people, jump out of planes, do lots of things. Things you are afraid of. The only thing an artist should be afraid of is fear itself. Live a big life that will give the essential for any successful artist. And be confident about yourself.

“Have a work ethic. Do the work; treat it as a full time job.”

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THE PUBLIC

THE PUBLIC

You can also:• Relax in the Pink Tank Café Bar;• Hire the venue for a private party, event, conference• Hire the recording studio;• Rent an amazing office space.

Here you can find:• Free themed exhibitions, installations, incorporating new technolo-

gies and traditional techniques, changing every 3 months;• Workshops and celebrations for the whole family;• Art classes;• Performances: comedy, theatre, music shows, movies;• Dance and zumba lessons;• Community events.

Accessibility:• Free Wi-Fi;• Wheelchair access;• Assistance dogs welcome;• Visual impairment;• Assistive hearing;• UK Baby friendly.

Location: New Street West Bromwich B70 7PG

Website: www.thepublic.com

Whole Building opened: Wednesday – Saturday 10am-5pm; Sunday 11am 3 pm

By Donata Kukyte

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Winter 2011

Choy Ting LawGabor KovacsDonata Kukyte