Fixed on ephemeral colours

"It is almost always pitch dark when you do graffiti. Sometimes you cannot even see your own hand,'' says Adam Nash, Dubai-based alternative graffiti-inspired artist and graphic designer.

For him, graffiti is a game of cat and mouse where you wait impatiently for the law to let its guard down.

“You sneak through shadows. Time is against you. Will you be able to delineate your thoughts and get away?

"Or will somebody see or catch you? There is a frisson of excitement and palpable fear,'' he says, speaking of the thrill of graffiti.

Nash was 9 when he first saw graffiti. “The art was so stylised. I was amazed even though I couldn't read it,'' he recalls.

He picked up the spray can at 13. “It seemed like a natural progression in creativity,'' he says.

Very few professional graffiti artists — such as London-based stencil graffiti artist Banksy — can make a living through graffiti.

Others switch to alternative careers. Nash stopped doing graffiti when he realised it could affect his career. His interest, however, didn't abate.

Graffiti is hard to define. It is a visual reification of one's personality, attitude and views. It is an identity.

And that identity fuels the eternal debate of whether graffiti is an art or a type of vandalism.

Not cool if legal

“It can be both,'' Nash says. “I believe it is intent and artistic quality that decides the side on which a graffiti sits.

"Graffiti gets bad press due to the numbers of flagitious and talentless artists. By nature, graffiti is vandalism.

"[But] if it were legal, it wouldn't be as cool. Graffiti with pernicious intent and an obvious lack of artistic capability — I call that vandalism,'' he adds.

Graffiti is a very personalised affair. Every graffiti artist has his signature. A trained eye can recognise individual styles such as “blink'', “elk'', “teach'' and “sub''.

Back in the 1980s, they were used to impugn the political system and express strong social messages.

Graffiti is different today, Nash says. “Yet, at its core, it has the same essence.

"Graffiti's objective is not to provoke political issues but to express individuality. And more importantly, graffiti is about fame.''

But recognition comes at a price. “Once you have been identified, you might as well write your name and stick your photograph on the wall,'' he says.

What amazed Nash about graffiti was how everyone involved knew each other, even if they had never met before.

Graffiti artists belong to a clique, where every artist knows the others' movements. They know and talk about a person's graffiti at a particular spot without even seeing it.

They know names of guards manning areas and the placement of cameras.

“We knew that the British Transport Police had a graffiti squad. They were on first-name basis with the most prominent graffiti artists.

"The artists know what they are doing is against the law. [But] if you dodge the law, you own that piece of graffiti. It is like a slice of advertising space you own for a little while.''

Interestingly, there is a pecking order among graffiti artists, a certain urban snobbery determined by location.

“The location of your public canvas defines how bold, daring and committed you are. The more notorious the hotspot, the higher the status,'' he says.

Tube trains, tunnels, rooftops and ledges were hotspots. Others included trains and tracks in the most inaccessible stations such as Waterloo and Kings Cross, and the streets in Covent Garden and Portobello.

“If you target sleepy yards of the suburbs, you would be bestowed the derogatory title of a bumpkin. It meant you are a craven to choose the easiest places,'' he says.

There are, however, places in and around London where graffiti is legal.

“But these places are located in areas where the general public would never venture. And the graffiti artists risk being mugged or worse,'' he explains.

It is also interesting to understand how graffiti has come to represent universal sub-culture, which is part of a larger culture of everything from hip-hop to urban fashion, beatboxing and breakdancing.

“It is the zeitgeist of a collective consciousness: a by-product of the maelstrom of cultural influences. It has a universal appeal and the youth can relate to it.

"Graffiti is also the progeny of poverty. Poor children, who would put their name next to big brands such as Nike and Sony, would say: ‘Look, I am as big as any multinational.'''

But Nash didn't stick to doing graffiti. “I evolved differently,'' he says. Ditching the spray can for a digital medium. His present work is inspired by the styles and expression of graffiti.

“The digital medium is more grounded, more illustrative. And time is on my side. [In digital medium], there is an option to undo, unlike graffiti where you cannot erase,'' he says.

Nash's work has strong interpretative elements. Each piece has a hint of provocation. He believes it is far more interesting to allow the viewer to interpret.

Transition represented

His debut exhibition at Five Green Gallery in January was a representation of his transition, both geographically and career-wise.

“I left London in 2004 and moved to Dubai. My art bridged that gap. Interestingly, it was also the inspiration behind the title of the exhibition — Please Mind the Gap.

"It is not a risk being recognised as a graffiti-inspired artist. I sign all my canvases as GFresh.''

According to Nash, graffiti belongs to the streets, not the gallery. If you put it in a gallery, it becomes something else entirely.

That is why very few pieces of Nash's gallery art actually contain graffiti.

“Though it does contain the same edginess and urbaneness,'' he says, admitting he doesn't want graffiti to become mainstream art.

“I don't think it should. If it ever did, it would become exploitative and cheesy just like its cousin, hip-hop,'' he says.