Part 2 - Revision 1 July Sticker Price
I’m spending the afternoon with Terry, an interesting friend I met 12 years ago—my first time Amsterdam.
.
He’s an expat, like me — managing a coffee house now. He was a cook years ago, a stressful gig he chose to end. He goes to Columbia in the off seasons. Takes hang gliding lessons and is good at the sport. Can stay up for an hour, riding the thermals. Escorted by curious birds on occasion. Next year will be his final lesson.
“It’s called, Practice Falling— learning to survive a collapsed wing at 1000 meters.”
“Jesus. What if you screw up?”
“They do it over water.” Terry takes a bite of lunch. We’re at the Oriental Chicken — my favorite restaurant in Amsterdam. “. . . and there’s a boat below,” he says, “They pick you up.”
“How do you make the wing collapse?”
“You pull straight down on the straps. Like this.” He puts his hands at the sides of his hip.”
“How do you get it working again,” I ask.
He does a bird like thing with his arms. "You've got a few seconds to get it right."
I think of Icarus, but don’t mention it.
We take a walk after lunch and I ask him about stickers I keep seeing in different places.
“Where the hell do these come from, Terry? What are they?
“It’s graffiti, man.” He seems surprised I’m ignorant of this— I’m old.
“They’re from Sticker Artists. There are thousands of them—everywhere. You make a design, a sort of icon, and you get ‘em printed up—rolls of them. It’s a form of graffiti. Graffiti is expensive if you’re serious about it. Spray paint is expensive. You might need six or ten cans, just to do one painting —then some poster guy wallpapers over it.”
“Poster guy?” I’ve never heard of poster guys.
“They work on paper, and then paste their art to walls.”
“Amazing. All these mediums. I never knew. How much does it cost, for stickers?”
“Roll of a thousand stickers costs from fifty to two hundred Euros. Depends on what you want—how many colors. Do you want the back slit, so it’s easier to peel them off? The quality. You get a lot of them. Two thousand, maybe three. They go all over the world, these guys, pasting their stickers. Want to see a good graffiti shop?”
I nod my affirmation. I didn’t know there were such things. Some fifteen minutes later we are at the Montana Graffiti Shop—also known as, Henx. No idea what inspired these names. Most probably have meaning to it’s clientele. There is no name on the front.
I guess you are supposed to know—a sort of in thing.
Inside the place are thousands of cans—every color in the rainbow and some the rainbow never thought of. I’ve been trying to find some brown spray paint for some work I’m doing at home. Impossible. You can get black, silver, green and red, and white . . . that’s it. Photo below (1/3 of one wall of cans) shows a maker’s colors.
Paintings at top of this photo were done with spray cans.
Below see price of cans. There are all kinds of nozzles that can give the artists anything from a straight line to a blur. The paint is water based, but users are advised to wear gloves a mask for protracted use.
Stencils
They sell stencils. Stencil graffiti is the only graffiti I know a little about —the infamous Banksy. It should be Banksys. There is more than one, sharing the name. If the image takes your breath away, for one short moment . . . an imploding, wow. Then it’s a Banksy.
Seems a bit low bag to buy a stencil, but not everyone can be a Banksy—or Banksys. You can buy a stencil and plaster it everywhere. The skull below is a stencil. Noticed it on a wall not far from my hotel in the Red Light District.
Next Blog: Part 3 Noticing Graffiti
No comments:
Post a Comment