Graffiti Artist Eadweard York
Eadweard York is a graffiti artist with deep roots. He has worked in the graffiti style nearly all of his life and professionally for more than 20 years. The formerly disenfranchised youth is creating significant art while transcending his personal demons.
"My Dad was a corporate guy who kept being transferred," Eadweard explains. "By the time I was in the ninth grade, I had been in 14 schools, and every time I got to a new school, I got into a fight.
"I started drawing as a little kid - (odd, sometimes mythological and tribal-looking) works that looked like graffiti art, before I even knew what it was - drawings that aren't very different from what I do now, the graffiti artist explains.
"I was always an outsider, drawing weird faces and primitive people." As a child, Eadweard made African-inspired masks and still does. Later, he incorporated mask images into his paintings.
Eadweard has lived on the streets, in punk houses, in cities and towns all over the country and has traveled abroad widely. "The only thing that got me off the streets was my art, and photography," he says.
"One day, I took everything I owned except my albums, and threw them all in a dumpster, bought a one way plane ticket, left everyone, and everything I knew, and decided I would try making a living as a (graffiti) artist. High up in the plane as I flew away from my life, I picked up a station on my Walkman playing The Clash song, 'Should I Stay or Should I Go.' It was hard leaving everything, and all my friends behind, even though my life sucked, it was all I knew. I never looked back, throwing everything away, and leaving was the best thing I could have done at the time.
"I had been doing art, painting, performance since I was a kid, I guess always preparing to be a graffiti artist when I grew up. I borrowed a Nikon camera from a friend and took some photos on the streets and some homeless faces. A punk girl showed them to a fashion photographer from New York and I got a job as his assistant. After a couple years, I actually started to making a living as an artist and photographer, selling my paintings, and shooting photos of some really great people, bands, and fashion."
Eadweard has opened galleries, shot fashion photography and played in bands. He has often painted on the streets and onto gallery fronts. On a few galleries in the Midwest that would not show his works, he spray-painted, 'Dead Art, Dead People."
With a graffiti artist's audacity, Eadweard's craziest act was mounting a show in Omaha, exhibiting works of a fake German artist he called 'Scherzkopf.' Before the locals got wind of his prank, he received major publicity.
His work has appeared in numerous publications including Spin, Rolling Stone, Plazm, Zero Hour, Arena, The Rocket-Seattle, Art Papers, Venice, Harpers, Art Review, Art Forum, Art & Antiques, Raw Vision, Emigre, The Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, The Orange County Register, The Reader - Omaha, Coagula, ART RAG, The Folk Art Messenger, Creative Loafing, American Art Review and RayGun.
Eadweard's portraits of underground celebrities, include Henry Rollins (Black Flag, Rollins Band,) Laurie Anderson, Mike Ness, David Worjorniwitz, Stiv Bators, John Lee Hooker, Pond, Kim Salmon, Janis Ian, Gerard Malanga, Smashing Pumpkins, Alien Sex Fiend, Bahrdou Zoohaus, Chester Stark, Allen Ginsberg, Jesus Lizard, Crispin Glover, Beat Happening, Vic Chesnutt, Rex Church, Local H, Material Issue and The Pain Teens.
(Read more about graffiti art, graffiti street art, graffiti as art, graffiti writing and tattoo art.)
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