Weekly Inspiration ✨
Artist: Phet
Phet
“Es el último”, Diego Armando Maradona 2017.
After serving Queen, country and Prince Bernhard in the Royal Air Force, Phet left in 1987 like John Denver on a jetplane. His destination was the good old USA.
Since 1983 he had been practicing the noble art of graffiti writing. Obscene phrases, tags, and throw-ups were his first steps toward a future masterpiece. In a time without the luxury of the internet, it was easier for Arnold Schwarzenegger to win an Oscar for Best Male Actor than to find any material regarding graffiti.
In 1984, Subway Art (aka the graffiti bible) was published. It hit him like a Tyson punch.
A perfect combination of art and rebellion, or as Hunter S. Thompson would put it:
“Graffiti is beautiful, like a brick in the face of a cop.”
The airplane landed on a foggy JFK airport and a shabby yellow cab dropped him at the YMCA on 34th Street. The only option to experience graffiti and its culture as a whole, was to visit the most relevant source on the globe, New York City.
With a handful of sticky tokens and a brand-new Yankee baseball cap to ‘blend in’, he went to explore the five boroughs, like Jacques Cousteau explored the seven seas.
Penpal Henry Chalfant (author of Subway Art) introduced him to the world of graffiti legends.
Phase2, the inventor of the graffiti piece, emphasized that a personal style was highly appreciated among writers.
Inspired by his New York colleagues, Phet improved his letters with some positive energy and introduced the ‘Nutso’ style in 1988. An illuminating geometric spectacal, consisting of interlocking letters, that were ready for an epic mortal combat.
A decade had passed since his first steps in the arts scene. Until now the street was his stage, walls and trains his canvas, but he never had that ‘proper’ education.
That changed when the Tilburg Academy of Visual Arts recruited him in 1993. He was so determined to succeed, that even the Bikermice from Mars couldn’t stop him from graduating cum laudanum in 1997.
Educated on the streets and now also armed with a deathly classical degree, he decided to put all his acquired knowledge aside. With his new weapon of choice the Unipin Fineliner, he slowly worked to master his freaky and authentic ‘Butso’ style.
His drawings are a composition of fragments converted from comics, video games, lyrics, letters, and patterns. Most recent is his mixed-mediawork.
A combination of multicolored-drawings in symbiosis with found materials.
In 2012 a dream came true when he was asked as an artist in residence in Osaka, Japan
Phet lives with his family in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. His biggest achievement besides falling in love with his wife and having two children, was shaking God’s hand in 2017. (from www dot phetworld dot com)
