I’ve spoken to quite a few street artist and designers in my time, some ultra famous, and some just surfacing from the depths of obscurity. I’ve encountered different sets of characters, people with different goals and targets set in their lives. I’ve conducted various interviews: plenty of which were informative and influential to the up and coming as well as to the wannabe’s. And now I present to you an interview that sits at the pinnacle of some of my favorites: which I would consider as enjoyable a read as it is every bit informative. Without further ado, here’s Armsrock.

PERSONAL INFO:

Name: Armsrock
Age: 20 something
Country of Origin: Denmark
Genre: Can you draw the blues?
Forms of Art: urban interaction, everyday illustration, good healthy social indignation and empathic existence with charcoal and knives
Mediums used: everything I can get my grubby hands on.

THE SERIOUS BIT:

FM: Hi Armsrock, I first found your stuff over at Flick’r just a little over a year and a half ago. Since then I’ve been following your work, and truly your progress has been remarkable. How long have you been doing this? What got you started?

AR: I have been drawing for as long as I can remember, but I guess it was through my involvement in the leftwing anarchist environment that I realized that I could actively “use drawing for something”. I guess that I have always been creating things that had a certain narrative to them. Pictures that tell stories. It’s a very special language, and it can be very powerful when aimed in the right way.
I think that we all start drawing at the same time, it is then just a question about if or when we stop and I think that this has something to do with what kind of stimulation we get, what kind of input and whether or not we believe that what we do makes sense. Drawing was always a vent to me, a way to let out what was in my head, so that way it has always “made sense”. When I was a kid It was a direct extension of playing. Somewhere I could go to sort out troubles or explore impulses.
I started making little photocopied comic book zines and at the same time I were getting into graffiti and streetart. The two things were very closely related, since I already had been working with aspects of urban interaction in the form of political activism.
Creative expression don’t need a justification, it is a powerful and necessary thing in its own right, but I guess that I have still always sought out some kind of “defined meaning” for whatever form of expression I was working with, trying to get things to make sense on some greater level.
Art is such a strange thing to be doing, and it happens often enough that I catch myself thinking “damnbeitall, does any of this make any sense?” I mean, a lot of art has a tendency to be distantly afloat in the real world. You cant eat it, or live in it, you are preferably not supposed to touch it, it is just supposed to be there and give you some kind of experience. And this is its right of existence, because it is so damn necessary that it is there. but there is also a lot of things about “fine-art” that I have just never been able to grasp and therefore felt the need to question, not always on an articulate level, but from a gut feeling.

FM: I found a piece that you had done back in 2005, a teen holding a camera, and have looked at some of your other pieces. I notice that your work has gotten a little darker; you used to use a lot of colours, and vibrant action, but I notice that there’s a slight sadness in most of your newer work. Or is it just me?

AR: hmm, you are not the first one to confront me with that. Has it gotten darker? Perhaps…I feel that it has gotten more honest, more mine, perhaps that is darker.
Quite often I have had the experience that I have been portraying something that was perhaps grim in some way, but I have been trying to capture something beautiful even in the grim parts, its not always that this intend conveys itself properly, and people will be like “why don’t you do something happy? Something that will make me smile? Why do you have to be so gloomy all the time?” but I think that I am partly doing the darker things to be able to smile, I feel that I need to be able to see the world, with all the horrifying and devastating things in it, I need to see it and feel it and react on it to be able to be properly alive in it.
I know that I deliberately have been reducing my use of colour in an attempt to reach some kind of greater directness in the simplicity. I have been trying to “reduce my vocabulary” sotospeak, finding that when I don’t shout so much people tend to listen more closely. Black and white are the greatest contrast, the greatest confrontation with weight, surface and line, and also the most accessible means, and I found that it was never just black and white. There is the basic colour of the paper that I work on, which changes with time and weather into different shades of yellow and brown, and then there are the colours of the surroundings, reality, a greater picture than I could ever paint.

FM: How do you produce these life sized wheat paste? What kind of mediums do you use?

AR: Its actually very simple, I have these huge rolls of paper which I cut pieces from, I then hang these on my studio wall and draw standing, then I cut the figures out with a sharp knife and whenever I feel that I have enough I go out and put them up. Voila.

FM: How long does it take you to produce one life sized figure? Do you start out with a sketchbook or do you freehand all the way?

AR: time is a strange concept. Something that one day will take me half an hour will the next day take me four. That and then the fact that I have a tendency to loose track of time when working, so I cant really tell you.
I used to be making sketches of every single figure I would make. I would spend this intense amount of time with walking around looking at people ( I still do this..) and then I would work out figures in the sketch books, then draw them on the large paper, first I would use a pencil, then I would work on them with brushes and markers, it would take an incredible amount of time to finish each person and some of them wouldn’t even survive a day.
Lately I have been starting to draw in a different way, I don’t do as many sketches as I used to and the ones that I do are crude scribbles and not very elaborate at all. I also stopped doing a “pre-drawing” before using acrylics and markers. There is this fantastic safety in drawing with a medium that you can remove with a normal eraser, and I wanted to get away from that, cut the safetybelt. So now I start directly on the blank piece of paper with a rather large brush and then I finish off the details with permanent-markers and spraypaint. Its been a process of finding confidence in my interaction with the lines and embracing the mistakes that I make. Also things that you draw several times tend to lose power. The more times you go over a drawing, the more elaborate and complex it will become, but I find that it will loose a certain amount of directness and never be as powerful as the first time you drew it. I try to draw as directly from memory as I possibly can, and this works the best way if I, in the immediate process, don’t think too much and just let my hand decide where the lines has to go.

FM: Have you tried stencilling before?

AR: I have been using stencils on various occasion and for very different reasons, it’s a wonderful medium, but these days I only use it very rarely. All the pieces that I do for the streets are originals, so the only time I use stencils in the context of these, has been when I have been doing patterns on clothes.

FM: You’ve done a lot of collaborations & exhibitions, which by far [artistically] do you find most pleasing, or which was the best experience?

AR: making things together with other people can be one of the most fantastically inspiring and invigorating experiences when you are able to catch each others impulses and beat. It can also be a slow death if it doesn’t work, but I have actually nearly only been having positive experiences, but I am also such a friendly, easy and compromising personality (“insert dry laughter”).
There are two collaboration projects that really shaped me a lot on different levels: one was with freaksgallery/beat:on, in context of a project called “city of names” in berlin, where we build a garage and lived in it while constructing a series of multifunctional mobile barricades.
The other was a week I spend with swoon in bilbao, scrambling around in this part of the city which had been completely destroyed. It was the oldest part of bilbao and you could literally see gentrification coming stalking up the hill. So we wandered around in this post-apocalyptic playground and had crazy conversations with the neighbours, who very well knew that their houses were up next. And there was the general feeling that whatever we would do, it would tab into this far greater history, the history of en entire neighbourhood. It was like working in the middle of this huge open wound.

FM: You’ve done quite a few artworks in your time [ok, quite a lot, actually!] Do you have a favorite piece?

AR: whenever I do have a favorite piece, the experience tend to be kind short-lived. The joy is in the process, in the feeling of movement and the action of creating something. Right now I have the feeling that each drawing creates a question, but I often don’t even see this until the next one has come with an answer, and yet another question.
There seems to be something in our culture which has us bound on preserving everything for some kind of abstract eternity. We want to hang on to everything and preferably have it stay the way we invented and created it, perhaps because life is so short. But exactly because life is short I think that it is important to be able to let go. With art as much as with most other things. You can paint all these wonderful pictures, and then have them stacked in a room and go like “ I have created all these beautiful things, and I have them to prove it” ok, much good may it do you.
If that is what you need to do then take my blessing and keep it, but I think that our purpose is to go and keep going. Everything of true value around us is ephemeral, so I try to react on this and create something equally fleeting.
It’s a “the path is the goal” kinda thing. A little city-zen for you there.

FM: Which city has most of your wheat paste and drawings?

AR: Bremen, the strange little north-german vacuum of a city where I for some peculiar reason have decided on living.

FM: What was the purpose you started doing what you are doing, and do you find that the purpose is still the same or has it changed drastically for you?

AR: it would be weird if the purpose of something didn’t change along with oneself, and we do change, all the time, that’s adjustment to life. But I think that I would say that the core of the purpose remains the same, but it has branched out in many different directions, it takes me places that I couldn’t even dream of and inevitably changes me. Its like this map of a city, where you can only draw the map as you go along through the landscape. Until you travel through something it is just shimmering white spots. The thing with the map is that whatever you discover will also change the structure and appearance of all that you have discovered before, then it becomes important to retrace your own tracks. Your own history is a two way street. Don’t trust people who claim to have finished any search.
When I started working on the streets I wanted to try to create something that was a counterweight to the fictive plastic world of the ever-present commercial. I wanted to do something that was an affirmation of life, for free and personal. This hasn’t changed a bit, only become more layered. The last couple of years has been this ongoing study of the city and its people and fragments. All the stuff that I have created are merely the visual notations I made while doing this study.

FM: What’s next in line for you? Working on any new projects or are there any upcoming exhibitions you’d like to tell us about?

AR: the year is already pretty planned, which is wonderful and kinda frightening. There are some shows and collaborations coming up, with people I am really looking forward to be working with. I could name-drop and say things like : D’Face, Chris Stain, Poncho, Elbow-Toe…San Francisco, London, Los Angeles. And I am making a new book, there isn’t a specific release date for this, but hopefully it will be out around the summer, its gonna be an opus to violence, but I cant tell you more now, they said keep the cards close, eh!

THE POTSHOTS SECTION:

FM: Blu or Banksy?

AR: both of them! On an empty parking lot in Oregon, while doing a jig to fun-crusher-plus!

FM: Ever been in a fight? Did you win or lose?

AR: yes, and both. But fights are generally ridicules and stupid, but there are times when I believe that militancy and physical aggression can be the only solution. It’s a tool, and should be used very carefully.

FM: Have you been Asia?

AR: no, not yet, but it is definitely on my list of things to do before the ice-caps melt.

FM: You better get here real soon then! If you’re here in Malaysia, you’re more than welcomed to crash over at my place. How much time do you spend on the telly?

AR: Nil. I don’t have a television, and besides from that, it rots the brain. I do watch a lot of movies and documentaries though. I guess that my thing with television is that I cant concentrate on it.

FM: Amen. Have you ever been arrested? Tell us about it.

AR: I have had my share of close-contact with the law, but not in connection with art. But hell, as it is, it is nearly impossible going about not getting arrested. There are some really weird laws out there, did you know that in Denmark it is specified in the law that “it is illegal to drive a vehicle unless a man is walking in front of said vehicle with a flag to warn horse-drawn carriages that a motorcar is coming”.
In Baconsfield, Canada, it is considered an offense to have more than two colours of paint on your house, and in Toronto “you may not drag a dead horse down Yonge St. on a Sunday”. In Tennessee, US, “you cant shoot any game, other than whales, from a moving automobile” and in Miami, its illegal to “go around imitating animals”. I mean, waddaya gonna do?
On a lighter note: I just read that in London “any person who have had the honour of freedom bestowed upon them, have the right to herd their cattle over any of London’s bridges, at any time”. Im gonna ask Chris Stain to try this one out with me this coming summer.

FM: Someone should drop some cows over at Highbury [Arsenal's stadium]. Hehe. What’s your most horrible experience?

AR: my most horrifying and valuable experience taught me that you cannot believe in or trust any authority, least of all your own.

FM: Any Last Words?

AR: This morning I was, again, flipping around in Eduardo Galeano’s “Days and nights of love and war, and there was this sentence that stuck in my mind:
“we are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are, our identity resides in action and in struggle”.

Thank you, Armsrock.