The Early Days

A look at my early graffiti years in Amsterdam and New York, starting in 1983. These archives trace the beginnings of my style, the scene I grew up in and the foundations of my current practice.

One of my first tags: in white on the black bottom strip of the Pepergasthuis, Groningen 1984

Groningen, 1984 — The beginning

Actually, I started writing in Tilburg, a city in the south of the Netherlands, where my family lived for a short period. I remember b-boys dancing in the main street. From family trips to Groningen and The Hague, I remember the abundance of street tags on these cities’ streets, names like Pinox’82, Barracuda or Hunter spoke to my imagination. Visual artist and art teacher Willem de Boer van Groningen, a friend of my parents, brought me photographs of New York subway pieces. Bigger, more artistic and more colorful, they looked very different from the tags I knew. With this limited but powerful information, I started drawing outlines.

After we moved back to Groningen, more examples of hip-hop culture gradually began to make their way to Europe. I wanted to be part of it. My first sprayed tag, in blue metallic, was made in the back of a bus with a can left over from painting my BMX bike in Tilburg. Many tags followed, along with a series of pieces painted -without permission- in the basement of my high school. From there, tags and pieces appeared on the streets of Groningen, throughout the city. It was the next logical step.

“Graffiti has been very important to me in life, not just as a career.”

— Mick La Rock

Style writing and letter development

Letters became the main focus early on. My parents surprised me with a copy of Subway Art, and I spent three days in my room tracing the artists’ outlines to understand how stylewriting letters were constructed.

After the screening of Beat Street, I met other writers in my hometown. When Style Wars was broadcast on Dutch national television in 1985, many other teenagers across the country started writing. Style influence happened through the exchange of Xerox-copied sketches. These included outlines by artists such as Shoe, Cat22, Bando and Mode2, who at the time were considered style kings. We were all influenced by what was happening in Amsterdam, Paris and London — cities that were much closer to home than New York in the pre-internet era.

The early magazine Freestyle, together with travelling and painting throughout the country using the Tienertoer train ticket, further broadened my development as a writer.

New York connection

New York New York Big City Of Dreams… One of the first rap albums I ever held in my hands was by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. On the cover were nine photographs of New York stylewriting graffiti. At a time when information was scarce, these images — together with magazines, books and films about stylewriting, MC-ing, b-boying and DJ-ing — opened up a world that seemed almost impossibly far away.

New York became the Mecca of everything I was drawn to. In the 1980s, however, it was also far beyond my reach, both financially and simply because of my age.

That changed in 1992, when the Groninger Museum presented the retrospective Coming From The Subway. The museum embraced my initiative to contribute to the exhibition's narrative around graffiti in Groningen. It was there that I met artists I had previously known only through books and films: Blade, Quik, Daze, Dondi, Futura, Zephyr and many others. Most importantly, I met Lady Pink.

In 1993, Quik and I painted a huge bridge in Groningen. That project became my ticket to New York. Invited by his friends Sach, CAVS and IZ the Wiz, I finally travelled to the city that had shaped so much of my visual world.

Seeing New York up close — its trains, handstyles, large pieces and the spaces they occupied — changed my understanding of letters, structure, rhythm and scale. What had existed for years through photographs, magazines and films suddenly became tangible.

The journey confirmed something I had already begun to develop in Groningen: that lettering, space and rhythm could move between cities and cultures, while taking on a character of their own. New York did not only give me a new direction; it deepened the one I was already following.