Ben Eine and the Conflict of “Change”

If you are driving around LA and happen to stumble upon some graffiti (shocking fact I know!), take a closer look and it might just be the typographic shutter signature work of London based artist Ben Eine. Eine is a vandal, graffiti writer, and street artist silk-screened under his trademark name (Eine is German for one). Using the streets and shutters of London, Paris, and now LA, the master printer has become infamous for his bold expression of typography, figuratively and otherwise. This month, he is making his LA debut at the Carmichael Gallery with his new show “The A-Z of Change”, a mixed media venture combining spray paints, master narratives and words of action with images of the past layered upon multicolored grids. The show premiered this Thursday, but Eine took some time before the exhibition to speak about his current work and the ups and downs of street art.

Opening Night of “The A-Z of Change”

Tell us a little about yourself, and what inspired you to choose the mediums of typography and so on.

Basically, I just started writing graffiti when I was about 14 and I was never really into characters, background, and all that kind of shit. I was always just into the letter form, and how letters change when you put them with different letters. I regularly changed my name just so I can explore that avenue of different forms of letters or letter form. And it got to a point where I couldn’t really carry on writing on trains and tagging just because I had been arrested so many times, but I didn’t want to stop painting, so I kind of moved more into street art, a kind of happier, friendlier form of graffiti I suppose, where you don’t get arrested so much. Typography is a continuation of my interest in graffiti, and my interest in graffiti was the letter form.

You have had exhibits around the world…

Yeah Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and New York, and Denver, and then group shows all over the place, and now LA for the first time.

And how do you like it?

Hot and sunny… everyday, hot and sunny (laughs).

“The A-Z of Change” implies an alphabetical rundown of change. How does this correspond to your exhibit here?

Well, when you doing a show, you’ve got a set of challenges and I am always producing, especially for solo shows, a new body of work, something different, something new, and I wanted to do something that was London based or quite English. I started reading lots about Jack the Ripper and was going to do or started off with something quite Victorian London, and just spent an age in my studio and nothing was really working but out came this montage of photographic images that I was kind of feeling and enjoying. So I scrapped those ideas and started looking at more current events that happened in London and England. It is just kind of interesting when reading a story about, for example, the poll tax riots, which were a big thing in like ’89 I think. It was a really powerful story, people got in the streets, fought the police… so many people upset and angry, but all of those really interesting stories were illustrated with photographs of people that you have never seen before, never heard of, no famous people involved and it was those kind of people that really interested me. And I started working with images from those kinds of stories, creating the paintings that I have got here.

Power 

Change

You superimposed words/lettering over action, photos of events and people. Can you tell us a bit about the choices of words/typography and the photos and the way in which you combined the two?

Well, again, my original idea with the Jack the Ripper thing, but I was drawn toward stained glass windows, and the kind of the thick leaded windows with bright colors behind, and again, when I started using the photographic images I wanted to continue that theme, so I just started playing with different grids and different kind of stained glass window shapes and it was just a simple grid that worked the best. So I just kind of laid out a grid on the canvas, sprayed each square a different color, and because I was putting a photographic image over the top and it was going to be quite hard in small places to see what the letter was so I wanted to use a really simple font. Arial black I think it was, just kind of stretched and twisted a little bit to fit into the squares. And then just started writing lists and lists of words that went with the images and narrowed them down, and then painted them.

Would you say actions speak louder than words, or speak certain words?

Depends what actions they are…(laughs)

You have pieces titled Battle, Change, and Champion.

They are kind of words that I felt suited the images that I had chosen and put the two together.

Battle

Champion

You’ve taken your work from the streets to the gallery. Do you have a preference for one over the other?

I much prefer painting in the street. It’s a lot more fun, but unfortunately this is now my job so I have to earn money. If I had a trust fund, I would never step foot in a gallery (laughs).

I also heard that you were tired of running from the police.

Yeah, but if you’re clever you can get out of being arrested.

What about the temporality of your outdoor shutter pieces?

It’s got a lot do with the wall and where the wall is and who’s going to see it and the amount of time you’ve got to paint it. A lot of the big walls in London I do not have permission to paint on so it’s about what you feel you can get away with. Also trying to do something new and trying to pick a new font or create a new font and then how to apply that idea on the wall whether it’s freehand, or projected, or done with stencils. Yes, a lot to do with the wall and where it is. I just carry on finding walls and painting them. And the shutter thing is kind of an ongoing project. I am kind of known for it and in graffiti terms… they are just like in London where everyone does these big silver things on the side of the tracks and they are just called “dubs; they are just quicksilver filled in with black outlines, white highlights, and they are kind of the equivalent of that, but on the street. They are quick, simple.

What are the benefits of outdoor works?

People will see your work, who would never see it in any other way. I like the idea of someone walking to work, same journey everyday, and then one morning they turn the corner and there is this mad painting they’ve never seen before and it shouldn’t be there, and then two weeks later it’s been painted over. I like that kind of spontaneity and the surprise of street art. It’s fun.

Carmichael Gallery Camouflage.

What’s your opinion on graffiti as art vs. graffiti as vandalism?

Graffiti as vandalism is just really, really good fun, and I can fully understand why everyone hates it, but it’s just great fun. It’s wrong just to bracket everything painted with a spray can as graffiti because within graffiti there are amazing productions that take days that most people would be happy to have somewhere in the neighborhood and then there are the kids who go around tagging and window etchin’ and that kind of shit. But it’s great fun so its difficult. It’s wrong to call it all graffiti and all graffiti vandalism. You know, its not, and it’s silly to do that.

Do you think you will be doing shutter work in LA?

I have done 20 shutters already.

Since you’ve been here?

Yeah.

Any certain neighborhoods?
Melrose and Fairfax, and we’ll probably go out and do some more tonight.

The exhibition will be open for viewing through Thursday, July 30 2009 from 1.00pm – 7.00pm.
Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art
1257 N. La Brea Ave.
West Hollywood CA 90038