LoveEast.53

| East life
E6 resident Mathew Heath asks,
getting more colourful?”
I don’t mean the many spring flowers or the beautiful
parks, though that certainly helps, I’m talking about
graffiti/spraycan art that has been popping up more
and more in Newham.
I think I first came to Newham as a teen in
1986 when the older lads in my hometown had
identified what we would call a “hall of fame” (i.e.,
some walls where there was a lot of good graffiti
art) somewhere in West Ham. We would come
up early in the mornings to avoid any trouble and
go to these places – West Ham, the Half Moon
theatre, Covent Garden, Westway - to hone our
own styles by photographing and then copying
some of the letters.
Of course, I didn’t realise then, as a 14 year old,
that one day I would make Newham my home,
get married and bring up my family here while
somehow maintaining a love for this sometimes
maligned art form that had its roots in 1970s New
York City and spread across the globe (as did the
hip hop music that accompanied it).
As teens, in suburban Essex, our first exposure
to graffiti art was via a documentary called Style
Wars and a book called Subway Art. Graffiti
grew from messy “tagging” (writing your name/
nom de plume on every available surface) to big
colourful lettering and characters, to a respected
art form that moved into galleries. Some of the
experts from back in the day, Mode 2 of The
Chrome Angels (who won a lot of commissioned
pieces in the 80s) can now command thousands
of pounds for his artwork. Banksy, whose roots
were in the Bristol scene, probably needs no
introduction.
So this brings us to Newham. The first
commissioned graffiti art I noticed was in the
8 LOVEEAST
Images: Mathew Heath