EWOK

EWOK: I’m EWOK from the AWR MSK Seventh Letter Heavy Metal crews.
Frank151: How long have you been an artist?
E: That was in the top two professions I wanted to do from when I was a little kid. I think since I was three, since my earliest memories of being alive, I was focused on being an artist.
F151: What was the other profession you were interested in?
E: You know, normal grade-school kid shit—being in the NFL or NBA or something like that. Maybe for a couple days I wanted to be an astronaut.


F151: Where did you grow up?
E: I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and I lived there until I went to college. Then I moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota and I lived there for about ten or so years. Somewhere in the middle of that I lived in Chicago for about a year and a half.

F151: What was the art scene like in Wisconsin growing up?
E: It probably wasn’t that good, but I was in my own world, drawing and stuff. Most of the art influences I got were from MTV, or other stuff like that.

F151: How did you get into graffiti?
E: I didn’t really start writing graffiti till the end of high school. In most of the Midwest, graffiti wasn’t really on the radar, with the exception of Chicago. Chicago had a pretty thorough scene that went back to like the ’80s, maybe even before that. Milwaukee’s two hours away, but it never really made it over there until the early ’90s. Maybe around ’90...’91, I first started seeing real graffiti pop up. I was seeing the beginning of what was turning into the Milwaukee scene. I had seen sporadic glimpses of it throughout my life. It was this mystery that I was trying to figure out but I didn’t get enough of it to get that far.
For me, it didn’t take a whole lot. There’s specific things that just stuck out in my head, like, “Oh shit, that’s graffiti. I want to pay attention to this. I want to learn more about it.” And then right around my junior or senior year of high school, me and my friend—this kid who ended up writing MBER, he was a prolific freight writer—were getting into it at the same time. One of the main dudes from Milwaukee who was really killing it was this kid OBIE1. Even by today’s standards his stuff would be really good. He was doing really ill characters and really dope simple letters. So we were studying his stuff, and senior year I came across Subway Art and Spraycan Art at whatever the bookstore chain was at the time, so I got those.


There was one part of the city where there was a big concentration of graffiti—this was right before I went away to college—and we would go to this alley behind this restaurant called Beans and Barley and that dude OBIE1 and a bunch of kids from his crew had characters and shit we’d never really seen up close before. We couldn’t figure out how they were getting the lines to come to these crisp points. We were like, “Man, what kind of cap does that?!” We didn’t know about cutting back or any of that shit. So we heard all these weird rumors and concepts, like how you can take a stock tip and stick a hot pin in it and make the shape of the hole different.
F151: It’s almost like kids talking about sex.
E: Yeah, you have a hazy notion of what it is, but it’s very wrong in a lot of ways [laughs]. There’s a lot of trial and error with that. We’d hear stories about people making markers out of chalkboard erasers and deodorant and other things.
SEVER: We used to try and find the biggest tips from random cans. “Basketball tips” was a fucking mystery find. The cap would spray the size of a basketball. It’s on mattress spray. Like, what the fuck is mattress spray?
F151: Did it really exist, or was it like the Bigfoot of caps?
S: Nah, my boy had one that sprayed as big as a basketball.
E: It’s weird that that stuff is not even a thought any more, to try and scavenge and find little supplies and things.


I had a conversation with my friend MUCH the other day. We were talking about how everybody has access to good paint and the best tips and there’s so much inspiration on the Internet, but graffiti really hasn’t gotten better. I almost think it’s gotten worse since all that stuff. There’s a couple people doing really, really good stuff that’s advanced in the last ten to 15 years, and then the status quo, which is really uninspiring and mediocre. There was something to it being this special thing that you really had to hunt down. I feel like it’s too accessible. Getting initiated into being able to access certain things weeded out the people who were not taking it seriously. Whereas now, any kid can just decide they want to do graffiti and find out almost everything about it online.
F151: How did you come to be a part of AWR MSK?
E: Once I was in Minneapolis, I met this other kid who wrote KEPT. His parents lived in San Francisco. During summers when school was over he would go back to San Francisco. He ended up meeting BLES from AWR and ended up getting put down with AWR. I guess KEPT was showing BLES stuff that we were doing back in Minneapolis, so that’s how I met BLES, and I eventually ended up getting put down in the crew. Shortly after that I came out to LA. BLES invited me to his wedding and that’s where I met REVOK, EKLIPS, GKAE, TYKE, and PUSH. Me and SEVER were already trading flicks at the time.
F151: Were you doing that through the Internet?
E: No, this was through actual, physical mail. We had mutual friends. There were Minneapolis people who were transplants back and forth between Atlanta, so some of my friends were Minneapolis writers who were ahead of me in the curve—doing it for longer and knowing their shit. They moved to Atlanta and then I met him. That was an era of graffiti that is probably gone forever—when people were actually sending flicks through the mail.
Before I was officially in the crew, or maybe shortly after, I remember seeing photos of AWR writers meetings, and I remember seeing TYKE, like, “Holy shit, who’s that seven-foot-tall Asian dude?” ’Cause he was the tallest Asian dude I’d ever seen. Then someone told me it was TYKE, and I was like, “Oh shit,” ’cause I was a big fan of TYKE’s stuff, and it was weird to actually put a name to a face.


That’s another weird phenomenon about graffiti—when you know somebody through their work before you actually meet them, you have an image of what they’re like or what they might look like, and they’re always completely different than what you expect. I always thought that GKAE was just gonna be this ill Cholo guy, and he’s a super normal, super small White dude.
F151: It seems to me that GKAE broke a lot of people’s preconceived notions about graffiti writers.
E: [Laughs] Yeah.

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