Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Paris: Heavy Metal

Around midday today, a battle began inside Gare de Nord train station where 4 world class graffiti artists made a Thalys train their battleground. Each had to paint their carriage within 5 hours 15 minutes - the clocked started at 10am...
SEAK (Cologne, Germany) is an amazing artist. He used both can and pen to make this amazing creation which IMHO was by fair the more complete and beautiful when time was up today. Check out more about SEAK on his website www.seakone.com.
I have to give SEAK mad respect for rocking these shoes whilst painting. For someone like me who ends up covered head to toe in paint after a day painting, I can only imagine what it's like to speed paint in a battle on red carpet and not spill a drop. PROPS!SEAK finished his carriage first, followed by JONONE.
JONONE (Paris, France) was originally from NYC. He's part of the Né dans la rue - Graffiti exhibition at Fondation Cartier. He was and remains an influential character amongst graffiti artists world-wide. You can read more about JONONE on his website www.jonone156.com.
SOZYONE (Brusells, Belgium) started his art career as a child who forged banknotes to buy cigarettes (no shit!). His unique, sometimes abstract style was out in force today. Check out his website www.sozyone.com.Unlike SEAK, SOZYs shoes have seen better days...Last but not least is ZEDZ (Amsterdam, the Netherlands). I've featured a couple of ZEDZ pieces on here before - I am a huge fan of his abstract/geometric style. I had a quick chat with ZEDZ and he looked exhausted (I bet he was after a 5 hour paint battle). You can check out more of ZEDZ work on his website www.zedz.org.
Admittedly, it must have been pretty awesome to paint a legal train right there on the station platform. And not just any station - Gare de Nord. It's like Central on crack. In the end it turned into a bit of a media circus - cameras everywhere, and graffers became rockstars. It freaked me out a bit - aren't graffers meant to be criminals? Not when a train company company wants to put the shoe on the other foot and let graffers paint a train obviously!

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