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| REMI/ROUGH |
Remi Rough is one of the most respected and sought after UK artists around today. Along with a portfolio of commercial work Remi has exhibited in the UK, Australia, Europe, America and Canada. In August 2008 Remi spoke at London's Tate Modern. As part of the Tate's Street Art exhibition and series, he was invited to talk on the underground history of UK graffiti in front of a sell-out auditorium. Remi is also a musician, designer and author. He still lives in South London where he grew up, with his family. I was privileged to spend some time with Remi recently at his studio, where we told me about his work.
Tim: I wanted to begin by asking you about your history and how you came to be graffiti lettering artist?
RR: Well, I never thought of graffiti as being a career. I was just doing it and it was always something that I wanted to do, but I suppose I always felt like I was being pushed into the graphic design side of things ...”you’ll be great at graphics because it sounds like graffiti ... I don’t know what their rationale was, but everyone always used to push me in this direction; even in school, my careers officers would say it and then, when I finally got on a Graphics Design course – I didn’t like it so I left and worked for my Dad, and then went back and did an art foundation course, which kind of opened it up for me a little.
Tim: Where was that?
RR: Croydon Art College .... I’d nestled the idea, in my brain, that I wanted to paint, that the direction I wanted to go in was fine art, not graffiti, not graphics ... I didn’t want it to be in a block. But then, you know, you get embroiled in the world of graffiti and there are so many rules and regulations, formulae and traditions .... that all come with that which, I suppose, seems quite silly seeing as it’s a rebellious art form ....
Tim: What sort of work did you like then, was there a particular artist, or someone that you liked?
RR: Well ... there were a lot of things that I was aware of. Take, for example from the age of 9 to say 15 I was into very obvious things like Salvidore Dali. I feel that this sort of art was very accessible to a teenager. I didn’t have access to such artists as Jackson Pollock or Franz Jozef Kline. But then, bit by bit, you discover these things .... Also, abstract impressionists, for me, has always been the most interesting aspect of modern/contemporary art. However, having said that, I also love classical art, such as the Pre-Raphaelite work. I love people who can paint, who can capture the detail of a piece of flesh with light on it, you know - as opposed to flesh without light on it – and make it look like REAL flesh. It’s such a broad spectrum, you know, as to what I like and what I don’t like, but coming through the background of what I’ve come from, it took a long time for these things to digest and to become actual visual information and so, slowly, I began to realise that I wanted to become a painter, not a graphic designer.
Tim: What did you want to paint, people, scenes, still life?
RR: I’m not really sure .... I suppose I wanted to apply my skills in a big fashion! I love painting BIG. I love painting large and I guess that stems from being a graffiti artist because you get used to painting walls all the time and the bigger you do it, the better it becomes and then the more Kudos you get. So painting BIG was always interesting for me. And then, as you get older (I’m a year off 40 now!) you kinda look back at the things that make you .... lettering/graffiti .... it’s an abstraction in itself .... you’re taking the alphabet and you’re changing it ... arrows ... dimensional aspects .... and you’re doing it all the time .... you’re abstracting what is normally quite boring alphabet letters.
Tim: Funny you should say that, but in the course that I’m doing, we’ve been looking at people who devised different typefaces and fonts and when Macs came out, these people became quite upset because, you know, these letters were an art form, in themselves, and then a Mac operator comes in and stretches and distorts them etc and it’s funny that you actually like changing letters .....
RR: But, as graffiti artists, you take it so much further, so that you might take the bare essence of the letter ‘A’ and you change it so that it might have kicks in it, or arrows .... maybe three arrows going upwards towards the left and little bars which shouldn’t be there and connections and where the next letter might be a ‘T’ and so you decide to connect the T bar and the A bar etc. And so, there is nothing that you can’t do with it! But then, you kinda look back at those sort of things which gave you that dynamic, in the first place, and then you start changing it and I guess that’s when things start to become abstract for me. But, as a graffiti artist I’ve always being doing abstract stuff, as I like the idea of colours and shapes.
Tim: Is there is a difference between graffiti lettering and street art, or are they one and the same thing?
RR: No, they’re completely different. Graffiti has a 40 year heritage, starting out in the very late 60’s in Philadelphia and moved on to New York and bit by bit it turned from being something where people just wrote their names (tags), to this astounding art form. It left NY, very early 80’s and then hit London, Paris and Germany, all at the same time and had central hub points in Europe of say London, Berlin .... and it just spread, like a virus .... and I can remember, in the late 80’s, I had pen pals – and remember this was way before computers – that I’d be writing and sending pictures to, as this was the sort of thing that you’d do .... and they’d send me pictures – which is how that information was disseminating! I can remember, I had a pen pal in Kuwait who was painting tanks (laughter!) .... burnt out tanks ... and I can remember thinking I’d like to do that ... paint burnt out tanks!
It just spread like crazy and you had all these different sorts of styles ... you had, in Holland for example, really rounded, bubbly. Also, the style was often defined by the type of paint which was used. In Holland they had a particular sort of paint which, I can’t remember what it was called, but Sparvar in France .... really bright purples, pinks etc and Altona. But we had terrible paint in England (laughter). We had Krylon and Homestyle from B&Q, car paint from Halfords (laughter). And so, a lot of what you’d see was dependent on what sort of paint they had. And, you know, I can remember the Parisian style was really explosive and full of lines .... Paris was quite left field and quite out there and that was something that always pricked my visual senses ... the left field of it .... not the norm, not the traditional NY type stuff. That just didn’t interest me at all.
Tim: Was it a bit like Punk was to pop music? Was graffiti a similar sort of thing – a rebellion of a kind?
RR: I think graffiti was the grounds for street art, in a lot of ways ... but, they’re very different. Graffiti is a dialogue between peers ... it’s about the dialogue between the artists or writers and they had no interest in the passersby; they didn’t care if they read it; they didn’t care if they got it, or liked it .... whereas street art is about a dialogue projected outwards to the viewer/audience. There is no dialogue within street art, between the artists, and you can see that by how fragmented the work is. Also, street art is so new and it came so quickly and grew so quickly – and interestingly, it has fallen quickly as well – so that you only have a few artists who have come through it and stood that, short test of time .... Yeah, the critics hammered it, in fact everyone hammered it and because they hammered it so much, that’s why it initially became so big and it actually became bigger than it really is!
Tim: Thanks, that’s very interesting.... Bearing in mind that some of the stuff you read on the Internet might not be true! Your down as saying this .... “Graffiti is a battleground and the letter a weapon of choice” I like that – is that right?
RR: Yeah, there’s an artist from NY, who I was very influenced by called RammellZee and he died last year, unfortunately. He was the most amazing artist and he just came to graffiti. His life was bizarre. He’d make costumes and they’d be like Samurai costumes, but he’d make them out of junk. He’d go to junk shops and buy bits of wire and plastic and then he’d make the costumes. And, you know, he could hardly move in them, but he’d wear them. And he’d even put on shows and walk around in these crazy outfits ! His whole thing was to do with graffiti being like weaponry. He used to name arrows ... whip launcher arrows and some of his paintings were called ‘Letter A as tank’. And so, I guess it got me thinking that arrows are like an army .... trying to keep your enemies out .... and all about ego and being The Best, The Greatest .... and you have that dialogue, but it’s not always positive; it can be negative .... And, the outside world is completely irrelevant and all that matters is who is King, who has the most Tags up (laughter), who is the King of Wild Style, who can do the most amazing Burners. It becomes all about being out there. But, you know, it was a progressive kinda battleground. And your technique, your skill, your style was all you had.
Tim: When did you discover that you could make a living out of your art? Because, I suppose, the essence of doing graffiti is doing it when no one else is around and it’s not as if you could sell it because its on a wall in public place. At what stage did you think well I’ve got to make a living out of it?
RR: Well, I always knew I was going to do creative stuff. Actually, when I was young I used to be very into dance and I went to Italia Conti School for a few years and I kinda had it in my mind that I was going to be a dancer. But then the Art just overtook me really and I got a couple of commissions and I just got involved with things from a very early age. I was even involved in a show in 1989, in this gallery in Balham which, weirdly, had loads of press, because no gallery in London had ever done a graffiti show. It was practically unheard of. Yeah, it was this big graffiti show and I sort of wormed my way into it, by just blagging, and even though the work I did back then was terrible, I somehow got involved in it and from that I got a little commission to do a record shop and then another commission and that made me think this would be actually a really cool thing to do, as a job. I love the fact that, along the way, you know, there are always one or two people who like to refer to you as a sellout My answer to that is ... well who’s the sellout? Your going out at the weekend and doing a bit of graff’, or me actually doing it all day, every day and making it my work, my life, everything ... so that was kind of a good incentive as well.
Tim: And the work you do today, to me anyway, it seems very abstract. How would you describe it to say someone who has never seen it before, what can they expect?
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| Marozia |
RR: That’s really hard one. The girl who is curating the show in Vancouver, wrote a biography for me – she works in a gallery. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of a show and there were loads of bits and bobs that she needed, and she needed them like yesterday! and also because of the time difference and stuff, it was all a bit of a rush at the time, so she said ‘Look I’m going to write a biography about you and if you’re cool with it then great and she sent it to me and it was amazing and it said, basically, Remi’s work is Anti-form and I thought it was the best description of my work that anyone’s ever come up with. Because it is, it’s forms, shapes, letters and it’s slightly familiar, but yet, it’s not! And then it’s just upgraded and upgraded and upgraded and so Anti-form is the best description of what I do .....
Tim: I read that one of your friends is Steve More and he says that you have become ‘more minimalist over the years’. Is that true?
RR: Yeah. Totally. Less is always more!
Tim: Actually that idea was in my next question.
RR: Definitely ... the canvas is perfect until you paint it. And, you know, I’ve actually got paintings that have got four paintings on them! You just keep going over them and re-doing them. I like minimalism. I like clean lines. I like tension and I think that is one of the most important things in my paintings is tension. And that tension comes from growing up in Thatcherite Britain. You’ll know, but London was quite a nasty place in the 80’s to grow up in and I think that all comes out in my work. I was getting into fights on Telegraph Hill, when I was growing up in Streatham, or punch-ups outside the Odeon ... you know, those sorts of things all those sorts of things become your attitude towards your paintings. And so, the lines, the tension, the friction, the pulling .... are all different aspects of me, of my art, of my background, my future, what I think and don’t think ... so I think it’s all really important.
Tim: This idea of Less is More is very interesting I interviewed another artist recently, and I asked him the same sort of question. He’s sort of different because he works in linocut. He does a lot of famous buildings and he draws and photographs his work and then gradually takes more and more away from the original, so that he ends up with just the essence of what the building is.
RR: Well, it’s similar in graffiti. You spend all these years getting the letter R right, and then adding kicks and arrows and big flicks, arrows, kicks, halos, outlines and more lines .... so that it becomes something else. But, you can also break down THE LETTER R, so you have different shapes and lines.
Tim: I want to talk about colour, because you use colour to a great effect. I read you said once “you hear the whispers of contrasting colours”. I really like that, is that one of yours?
RR: I don’t remember saying that, but I like it!
Tim: You can claim that one!
RR: Yeah, you can the colours speak; you can hear them; they sort of hum
Tim: I was going to come on to that and funny you should mention that, sorry for interrupting you ... but I know you do music as well ... and I just wondered if you thought there was a link between colour and sound?
RR: Yes, totally. You can hear the hum of different colours. If you sat in an old print studio and pulled off all the lids on the old inks, as well as being as high as kite, you’d hear the different hums. They have these different resonance points, colour, and they get louder, so I suppose that’s why they say ‘that’s a really loud colour’ because, the more vibrant it is, the louder it is and if you put two loud colours together, then you’ve got a cacophony of sound. Most people can’t hear it because they’re not listening.
Tim: Yeah, I’m fascinated by this ..... I was going to ask, is your art influenced by your music, or vice versa?
RR: I think they walk hand in hand and often, change hands ...
Tim: I’ve got them down as being like brother and sister ... (RR Yeah ....) It’s funny because I was listening to the radio the other night and it was Bob Harris and he was interviewing Gregg Allman and they were making a joke of it that, in the 60’s, you could hear the colour, but obviously you can also feel colour .... like if something’s hot you get the idea of red and blue is cold and I just wondered if sound and colour go together?
RR: Yeah definitely for me .... sound, music .... noise is a big part of my life .... I’ll take my lap-top down into the studio and I’ll paint into certain moods and I’ll listen to certain bits of music and it’ll influence what I do. As an abstract artist, you know, you kinda have ideas, doodles and they may not come out like that, but it gives me a starting point.
Tim: I was going to ask you about that ... when you do a piece, do you do a sketch before hand?
RR: I’m constantly drawing, doodling and making things ... when I’m away (he shows his drawing book to Tim ...) and even though they might not necessarily be things that I paint, it dictates how you approach things ....
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| Early sketch for Cultural Movements in circular sweeps |
RR shows me his sketch book and I ask him if he can take a photo of a sketch that became a completed painting. (see pictures)
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| Cultural Movements in circular sweeps |
RR: (About the sketchbook, doodles, drawings etc) You know, it kinda references it. I couldn’t really draw that texture. I couldn’t draw the mistakes and the randomness of it and that’s what I like about painting. And you know, an idea is an idea until you make it real and then it’s not an idea anymore; it’s something else. It helps that I have that background in graphic design and there is an element of that in my work .... there is a lot of the linear, shape, form, composition, structure ... which I still love, but it dictates what you do now, it’s not necessarily the undercurrent.
Tim: I like some of the names you’ve given your work .... like The Argonaut (that reminds me of Jason and the Argonauts (laughs), where do you get the names ? Do they become before, or after?
RR: It depends .... in the new series I’m doing all the pieces have got papal names, so there’s one called Lucretia, who was Alexander III (I think) daughter. You get into it all and, for me, the name of a painting is really important and Dali had the greatest names for paintings ever, as did Jackson Pollock ... Summertime No 9 – what an amazing title for a painting and, and Full Fathom Deep. These are amazing titles and you remember them and it’s like a good film, you know .... if a film has a good title, then you remember it and if it has a rubbish title, invariably, you forget it. So, I think that’s a big part of it and you’ll hear the title before you see the piece and you’ll think ‘Hmm that’s interesting’. Argonaut came because I’m a huge fan of classical civilisation .... I did it at school .... it was my favourite subject at school and one of my favourite books is Homer’s Odyssey, which I recently re-read and it influenced a whole show I did in 2008 called Lost Colours and Alibis, which was all about me comparing myself to Odysseus, the hero, who is lost at sea, for years and is trying to get back to his family and his home and everything was against him and everything was thrown at him, storms, Cyclops, sirens etc but his focus was still to get to this point and even though he lost everything he did manage it. I was comparing it to like losing all those colours .... because I’d stripped all my work back and I started using colour more and more and then I wondered how I could strip my colours back and I was looking for a title for the show and then I came up with Lost Colours and Alibis and every painting was named after a chapter or a character, in the book, like Persephone which is a green painting and it’s really chaotic, because she was quite a chaotic woman. And there was one called Hyperion, who was a sun god and that’s a really bright painting. Another called Subtle Odysseus - which was his nick name .... and when I read the book again, I just got all these names which sounded perfect for the paintings.
Tim: Do places, trips etc inspire you as well?
RR: I’m really lucky – and I always say this to people – that I’m so lucky to I get to travel. I don’t really earn a huge amount of money doing what I do, but it’s not just why I do it, I do it because I love it and I’m so lucky I get to go to places I’ve never been. Last year alone, I went to Miami, San Francisco, New York, East Germany (which was AMAZING). I’ve went to East Berlin, I started asking the people I met there, all about when the wall was up and they told me a story about how they were all in a disco and it was a Tuesday I’ll never forget and the DJ came up and said ‘I think you should know that we’re all listening to the wireless and the wall’s coming down’ and everyone left and then, two months later, he went to the border which was miles and miles away – you know, like an hour and a half’s journey – and he got a 100 Deutschmarks and went straight off and bought a marker pen, because the government had stopped all the spray painting in E Germany because they wrote nasty things about the government, so you couldn’t get any spray paint and this really wow’ed me and I was so amazed. And again, I’m lucky because it all inspired me.
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| Electrical tower Santander, Spain 2009 |
RR: Yes I have been there a few times.
Tim: I went there for my 40th birthday and saw all the Gaudi stuff which is amazing.
RR: I’m very lucky, as I’ve got a gallery behind me now and it happens to be in Spain – in Santander, in the north of Spain - and the gallerist is the most amazing guy. He’s had me over and has put me in a couple of art fairs; I’ve done a couple of shows with him. I work with him quite a lot and I love it and I’m so inspired every time I go to Santander. So, I’d say Spain has a big influence upon me and Spain has had a history of amazing abstract painters, who came out of a post civil war period. Also, who I get to travel with inspires me. I like travelling with this guy from Australia and he’s an incredible artist, very successful and very hard-working and one of my best friends and I always find being with him, very inspiring, as he always gives good advice.
Tim: Is he part of the Agents of Change?
RR: Yes
Tim: I was going to ask you about the Agents of Change and what was behind it?
RR: The Agents of Change came out of the Recession, in a big way. There was nothing going on; there was no work and we were all asking what we were going to do, basically, because at the end of the day, you are selling a luxury people when they don’t really need it, in a recession, and they don’t really need it anymore at all. So we thought .... how are we going to do this? what are we going to do? how are we going to keep our profile up? And so, we decided that we were going to set up an artist collective that was completely devoid of any financial aspect – it didn’t need money; it didn’t need to rely on money and then we discovered this village, this crazy village on the west coast of Scotland, that no one had ever moved into (it was on the BBC news website) and they’d finally got permission to knock it down after 39 years (or whatever it was), because the locals hated it and I thought .... that’s quite interesting and I then sent it to my friend Timid, who is kind of our producer (he basically solves any problems, or finds out how you can do things .... he’s a genius ...) sent it to him and within three or four days he had the phone number of the council of this small town; he’d spoken to the landowner of the village and there was enough information for us to do a recky. So we went up on a little recky, just the three of us and we thought this could be quite cool, came back and started putting all the plans together and, literally, less than a month and a half later, we were there, painting, with permission, with the blessing of all the locals. We stayed in a local hotel, for next to nothing and the hotelier got me to paint the gable end of the hotel .... and it was amazing. But, you know, it was all done on a shoe-string budget ... we basically paid for ourselves, but it was to make a stand against all the auction houses, selling graffiti art and deciding No, this is not what it’s about; it’s not what being part of this movement should be about.
Tim: I saw the wall you did in Manchester with all those giant hands? Was that the same sort of thing?
RR: We were commissioned for that. Just to say .... the thing with the Ghost Village was that it went mental; it went all over the world; it’s been to something like 21 film festivals, all over the world and we’ve never PR’d it; we’ve never done anything other than put it on YouTube and that was it! Tim and Ben, who made it, it won an award a week ago, and it’s been subject of documentaries and because it went everywhere, the Future Everywhere festival contacted us and said they’d like to commission us to do something for them and they didn’t know what, but they gave us a budget of £4,000 and, at the end of it, we had £600 left, which we gave to Ben, as he makes all our amazing films! We put our accommodation, our food into the budget and we went and did this mad project and is called The Sharp Project.
Tim: I’m conscious of time now and don’t want to take up too much more of it, but can you tell me what you have planned for the future?
RR: Well we have been commissioned by Future Everything and we are talking to them at the moment about doing something even bigger than the last project and this will be sometime in May, which I’m quite excited about. We also have a show with Stormie Mills in Newcastle and I’m off to Vancouver in about 12 days, which is quite exciting and after that, I think I’m going away with the girls to Spain (think we’ll drive down) and then probably nothing else until October. I’ve got a show – a big, big show – in Australia which Stormie is curating; he’s not in it, he’s just curating it and there’s amazing John Fekner from New York – he’s probably the guy who invented Street Art ... you may or may not remember a famous photo of Ronald Regan, during his campaign, sat in front of the Bronx, all derelict and there are big, straight letters behind him, which say ‘Decay’. He is just the most amazing artist and is a really good friend of mine, so that’s quite exciting. But, you know, everything is exciting to me. Like going up to Newcastle is exciting – as exciting as going to Perth. Just like I said .... I’m very, very lucky.
Tim: Talking to you, you seem to really enjoy and have a real passion for what you do
PR: I do. I do.
Tim: It’s infectious, I suppose when you work with people that it rubs off on them.
RR: I hope so. I’m a real goader. Come on, do, do and go, go.
Tim: Well Remi, thanks for your time. It’s been very interesting, very enjoyable and very enlightening. Great stuff.
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