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Pure Evil in last night's Evening Standard., by chablis on Jun 13, 2014 21:31:45 GMT 1, Not sure if this has been posted yet, but a double page spread on Pure Evil in last night's London Evening Standard, and I'm going to say I've done a copy and paste, so full credit goes to Nick Curtis and the paper.
www.standard.co.uk/goingout/exhibitions/graffiti-artist-pure-evil-ive-had-10yearolds-telling-me-banksy-is-a-sellout-9531129.html?origin=internalSearch
Graffiti artist Pure Evil: 'I’ve had 10-year-olds telling me Banksy is a sell-out'
Charles Uzzell-Edwards, better known as graffiti artist Pure Evil, has a mission: to spray a new piece every day for a year. He’s left his mark around the world but now his project brings him back to Shoreditch. 'You need the dirt of London,' he tells Nick Curtis
Pure Evil: Charles Uzzell-Edwards at his gallery in east London
The day his painter father, John, died in March, Charles Uzzell-Edwards — better known as the graffiti artist Pure Evil — went out and sprayed an image on a lamp-post near his family’s home outside Swansea. The 44-year-old wasn’t really in the mood but in January he had embarked on 365 Street Art, promising himself he would paint or stencil or paste something up in public every day for a year, wherever he was, whatever the circumstances.
“It’s difficult because sometimes there are days when you … Just. Don’t. Want. To do. Anything,” says Uzzell-Edwards. (I can’t bring myself to call him Evil, not least because he’s such an open, soft-spoken chap.) He forced himself to create artworks during recent visits to Hong Kong and Paris, and during the four recent days when his wife Lisa, who makes art under the name Crossie, had an exhibition in Stockholm and he was in sole charge of their 18-month-old daughter, Bunny, “who was going cold turkey on the boob, so she was acting like a recovering drug addict”.
The day his painter father, John, died in March, Charles Uzzell-Edwards — better known as the graffiti artist Pure Evil — went out and sprayed an image on a lamp-post near his family’s home outside Swansea. The 44-year-old wasn’t really in the mood but in January he had embarked on 365 Street Art, promising himself he would paint or stencil or paste something up in public every day for a year, wherever he was, whatever the circumstances.
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It was hardest, though, coming up with ideas while going through “the process of finding out your father has a spot on his liver, going back to Wales, interacting with the thoughts going through your head and getting that terrible phone call at half-past midnight, which is never good. On the day of his funeral it was pouring with rain but I snuck out just before midnight and did something.”
Grief was, in some ways, a spur to creativity. “On one of the days I was doing things about how I hated cancer and after he passed away I did a little character saying ‘I miss you, dad’.”
Working back in Wales was different to Shoreditch — where he has his own gallery and where he lived until his recent move to Hertfordshire — because in London any hint of a new piece dropping sparks a social media treasure hunt.
As street art becomes increasingly mainstream and monetised, the 365 project is a return to Uzzell-Edwards’s and the movement’s roots, just putting work out there for better or worse. In Paris he painted a discarded crash helmet, postcards he left in a newsagents’ rack, and an abandoned piece of furniture, on which he wrote the legend, “You can’t buy happiness: steal it” with his personal tag, a vampire rabbit, running off with one of the letters.
“It’s like fly-tipping with art,” says Uzzell-Edwards. “You hope people will like it enough to take it home but it might just get chucked in a bin.
Some of his Nightmare paintings —stencils of style icons with bleeding eyes — which he put up in Shoreditch for the 365 project have already been painted over.
He was inspired to undertake the year-long endeavour, which may or may not result in a book of photos at the end, by his friend and mentor Banksy’s recent month-long residency in New York —and by the discipline it would take.
“It’s nice to have a structure and a set of rules you abide by,” Uzzell-Edwards says. “Although graffiti and street art are supposed to be an anarchic thing, there are rules about painting over other artists, which is a no-no, though it does happen.” The 365 project was also designed to prove that “this is what I do, that I don’t just sit in my gallery making money selling prints”.
Questions of “authenticity”, of rebel art versus rapacious commerce, are increasingly fraught in the graffiti world, where a £200 print will be instantly flipped on eBay for many times the price and where Charles Saatchi buys your work. On a recent episode of Channel 4’s Four Rooms, Uzzell-Edwards sold a Nightmare painting to gallerist Alex Proud for £1,690, only to find that Celia Sawyer would have paid £5,000 for it. There are people out there “harvesting” wall paintings, he points out, and others covering them with Perspex — but is this to protect images from overpainting by philistine councils or to keep them pristine until they can be cut out and sold in an unauthorised sale?
Banksy has objected whenever “harvested” work of his has come up for auction and sometimes refuses to authenticate it. He is also “not happy” with the current Unauthorised Retrospective commercial exhibition of his works at Sotheby’s S|2 gallery, organised by his former friend and helpmeet Steve Lazarides, with pieces on sale for up to £500,000. “I’ve had 10-year-olds telling me Banksy is a sell-out,” says Uzzell-Edwards. “I find all the conflict around it fascinating.” I mention to Uzzell-Edwards that I interviewed his comrade Ben Eine, the sometime renegade train-tagger, when one of his artworks was bought by David Cameron as a gift for Barack Obama, and Eine seemed deeply conflicted about it. Uzzell-Edwards suggests that street art has become like skateboarding — an underground culture rapidly commercialised. Graffiti is used to sell cars and cornflakes and is “the herald of gentrification” on estate agents’ brochures. Arguably, the fact that Uzzell-Edwards himself will be artist-in-residence at Southwold Pier during the Southwold Arts Festival next month is a sign that urban art has been thoroughly co-opted by the cosy mainstream. But skateboarding’s rebel spirit survived, Uzzell-Edwards points out, “and I don’t think people are going to stop writing on walls”. He is very funny about the snobbery of street culture, pointing out how quickly badges of individualism — beards, tattoos — become emblems of conformity.
“I don’t really fit the stereotype of the urban street artist,” he concedes. “I like opera and am quite happy to talk on Radio 3 about Kenneth Clark and Civilisation, because I don’t want people to feel you have to be one kind of person to fit into any kind of movement.”
He is related to Sir Thomas More, and possibly eight other saints, and grew up middle-class and Catholic in Wales, surrounded by artists at his father’s studio in Tenby.
“There were long lunches and discussions of Picasso and pop art,” he says. “I knew how to stretch a canvas and hang an exhibition from the age of 10.” He learned about Warhol, Haring and Basquiat at art A-level but, aged 20 in 1990, abruptly left the country for San Francisco.
“I got caught up in Trafalgar Square during the poll-tax riots and just thought, ‘This country is fracturing, I’ve got to get out of here’,” Uzzell-Edwards says. He meant to go for two weeks but stayed for a decade. He became a designer for streetwear label Anarchic Adjustment and a recording artist, absorbed the burgeoning graffiti culture and “consumed industrial quantities of weapons-grade psychedelics” in a bid to “reinvent myself”.
After a while he missed the energy and abrasiveness of London: “You need that dirt to grow.” He returned with “two pairs of socks” and a revoked American visa, whereupon Banksy gave him a job in his Oxford Street pop-up, Santa’s Ghetto: “I wouldn’t be here without him.”
Uzzell-Edwards began painting, developing his style and signature: his nom d’arte and haunting rabbit logo came from abiding guilt over a rabbit he shot as a boy in Wales. Calling his daughter Bunny is another aspect of this.
I ask how fatherhood has changed him and he says he no longer spends “hours in my man-cave making music and drinking whisky with my mates. Now I’m out of the gallery, home with my wife, bathing my baby and putting her to bed. Those are the moments that are precious and you don’t want to miss”.
He now feels a little “foolish as a man over 40”, sneaking through the midnight streets with an aerosol on a pole and a gas mask on.
He is so agreeable and chatty that I forget he is still grieving for his father.
“Having little Bunny running around being completely oblivious has been a tonic,” he says. “Anyone who is going through bereavement should be given a little baby to look after. My heart is melting right now but I’ve still got to make sure that she’s OK and look after her, and she makes me laugh.” And perhaps later, when she is asleep, he will go out and paint that day’s ephemeral piece of street art on a wall.
Pureevilgallery.virb.com
Not sure if this has been posted yet, but a double page spread on Pure Evil in last night's London Evening Standard, and I'm going to say I've done a copy and paste, so full credit goes to Nick Curtis and the paper.
www.standard.co.uk/goingout/exhibitions/graffiti-artist-pure-evil-ive-had-10yearolds-telling-me-banksy-is-a-sellout-9531129.html?origin=internalSearch
Graffiti artist Pure Evil: 'I’ve had 10-year-olds telling me Banksy is a sell-out'
Charles Uzzell-Edwards, better known as graffiti artist Pure Evil, has a mission: to spray a new piece every day for a year. He’s left his mark around the world but now his project brings him back to Shoreditch. 'You need the dirt of London,' he tells Nick Curtis
Pure Evil: Charles Uzzell-Edwards at his gallery in east London
The day his painter father, John, died in March, Charles Uzzell-Edwards — better known as the graffiti artist Pure Evil — went out and sprayed an image on a lamp-post near his family’s home outside Swansea. The 44-year-old wasn’t really in the mood but in January he had embarked on 365 Street Art, promising himself he would paint or stencil or paste something up in public every day for a year, wherever he was, whatever the circumstances.
“It’s difficult because sometimes there are days when you … Just. Don’t. Want. To do. Anything,” says Uzzell-Edwards. (I can’t bring myself to call him Evil, not least because he’s such an open, soft-spoken chap.) He forced himself to create artworks during recent visits to Hong Kong and Paris, and during the four recent days when his wife Lisa, who makes art under the name Crossie, had an exhibition in Stockholm and he was in sole charge of their 18-month-old daughter, Bunny, “who was going cold turkey on the boob, so she was acting like a recovering drug addict”.
The day his painter father, John, died in March, Charles Uzzell-Edwards — better known as the graffiti artist Pure Evil — went out and sprayed an image on a lamp-post near his family’s home outside Swansea. The 44-year-old wasn’t really in the mood but in January he had embarked on 365 Street Art, promising himself he would paint or stencil or paste something up in public every day for a year, wherever he was, whatever the circumstances.
![]()
It was hardest, though, coming up with ideas while going through “the process of finding out your father has a spot on his liver, going back to Wales, interacting with the thoughts going through your head and getting that terrible phone call at half-past midnight, which is never good. On the day of his funeral it was pouring with rain but I snuck out just before midnight and did something.”
Grief was, in some ways, a spur to creativity. “On one of the days I was doing things about how I hated cancer and after he passed away I did a little character saying ‘I miss you, dad’.”
Working back in Wales was different to Shoreditch — where he has his own gallery and where he lived until his recent move to Hertfordshire — because in London any hint of a new piece dropping sparks a social media treasure hunt.
As street art becomes increasingly mainstream and monetised, the 365 project is a return to Uzzell-Edwards’s and the movement’s roots, just putting work out there for better or worse. In Paris he painted a discarded crash helmet, postcards he left in a newsagents’ rack, and an abandoned piece of furniture, on which he wrote the legend, “You can’t buy happiness: steal it” with his personal tag, a vampire rabbit, running off with one of the letters.
“It’s like fly-tipping with art,” says Uzzell-Edwards. “You hope people will like it enough to take it home but it might just get chucked in a bin.
Some of his Nightmare paintings —stencils of style icons with bleeding eyes — which he put up in Shoreditch for the 365 project have already been painted over.
He was inspired to undertake the year-long endeavour, which may or may not result in a book of photos at the end, by his friend and mentor Banksy’s recent month-long residency in New York —and by the discipline it would take.
“It’s nice to have a structure and a set of rules you abide by,” Uzzell-Edwards says. “Although graffiti and street art are supposed to be an anarchic thing, there are rules about painting over other artists, which is a no-no, though it does happen.” The 365 project was also designed to prove that “this is what I do, that I don’t just sit in my gallery making money selling prints”.
Questions of “authenticity”, of rebel art versus rapacious commerce, are increasingly fraught in the graffiti world, where a £200 print will be instantly flipped on eBay for many times the price and where Charles Saatchi buys your work. On a recent episode of Channel 4’s Four Rooms, Uzzell-Edwards sold a Nightmare painting to gallerist Alex Proud for £1,690, only to find that Celia Sawyer would have paid £5,000 for it. There are people out there “harvesting” wall paintings, he points out, and others covering them with Perspex — but is this to protect images from overpainting by philistine councils or to keep them pristine until they can be cut out and sold in an unauthorised sale?
Banksy has objected whenever “harvested” work of his has come up for auction and sometimes refuses to authenticate it. He is also “not happy” with the current Unauthorised Retrospective commercial exhibition of his works at Sotheby’s S|2 gallery, organised by his former friend and helpmeet Steve Lazarides, with pieces on sale for up to £500,000. “I’ve had 10-year-olds telling me Banksy is a sell-out,” says Uzzell-Edwards. “I find all the conflict around it fascinating.” I mention to Uzzell-Edwards that I interviewed his comrade Ben Eine, the sometime renegade train-tagger, when one of his artworks was bought by David Cameron as a gift for Barack Obama, and Eine seemed deeply conflicted about it. Uzzell-Edwards suggests that street art has become like skateboarding — an underground culture rapidly commercialised. Graffiti is used to sell cars and cornflakes and is “the herald of gentrification” on estate agents’ brochures. Arguably, the fact that Uzzell-Edwards himself will be artist-in-residence at Southwold Pier during the Southwold Arts Festival next month is a sign that urban art has been thoroughly co-opted by the cosy mainstream. But skateboarding’s rebel spirit survived, Uzzell-Edwards points out, “and I don’t think people are going to stop writing on walls”. He is very funny about the snobbery of street culture, pointing out how quickly badges of individualism — beards, tattoos — become emblems of conformity.
“I don’t really fit the stereotype of the urban street artist,” he concedes. “I like opera and am quite happy to talk on Radio 3 about Kenneth Clark and Civilisation, because I don’t want people to feel you have to be one kind of person to fit into any kind of movement.”
He is related to Sir Thomas More, and possibly eight other saints, and grew up middle-class and Catholic in Wales, surrounded by artists at his father’s studio in Tenby.
“There were long lunches and discussions of Picasso and pop art,” he says. “I knew how to stretch a canvas and hang an exhibition from the age of 10.” He learned about Warhol, Haring and Basquiat at art A-level but, aged 20 in 1990, abruptly left the country for San Francisco.
“I got caught up in Trafalgar Square during the poll-tax riots and just thought, ‘This country is fracturing, I’ve got to get out of here’,” Uzzell-Edwards says. He meant to go for two weeks but stayed for a decade. He became a designer for streetwear label Anarchic Adjustment and a recording artist, absorbed the burgeoning graffiti culture and “consumed industrial quantities of weapons-grade psychedelics” in a bid to “reinvent myself”.
After a while he missed the energy and abrasiveness of London: “You need that dirt to grow.” He returned with “two pairs of socks” and a revoked American visa, whereupon Banksy gave him a job in his Oxford Street pop-up, Santa’s Ghetto: “I wouldn’t be here without him.”
Uzzell-Edwards began painting, developing his style and signature: his nom d’arte and haunting rabbit logo came from abiding guilt over a rabbit he shot as a boy in Wales. Calling his daughter Bunny is another aspect of this.
I ask how fatherhood has changed him and he says he no longer spends “hours in my man-cave making music and drinking whisky with my mates. Now I’m out of the gallery, home with my wife, bathing my baby and putting her to bed. Those are the moments that are precious and you don’t want to miss”.
He now feels a little “foolish as a man over 40”, sneaking through the midnight streets with an aerosol on a pole and a gas mask on.
He is so agreeable and chatty that I forget he is still grieving for his father.
“Having little Bunny running around being completely oblivious has been a tonic,” he says. “Anyone who is going through bereavement should be given a little baby to look after. My heart is melting right now but I’ve still got to make sure that she’s OK and look after her, and she makes me laugh.” And perhaps later, when she is asleep, he will go out and paint that day’s ephemeral piece of street art on a wall.
Pureevilgallery.virb.com
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