I’d like to start commenting on some of my earliest influences in regards to painting. Each week, I will post a sequence of photos accompanied by a few thoughts. I’ll start with Vancouver.
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When I first became involved in graffiti there weren’t a lot of people I knew who did it. Especially where I’m from, a cold and brutal Canadian city called Edmonton. When I first started painting there was literally maybe 5 others who were fumbling around trying to figure it out. In 1994, I met a girl named Sally who wrote ‘Dolly’ at the time, she was the most active and had a really cool Vaughn Bode-like graffiti style. She was rolling with a writer from Vancouver who wrote ‘Jimbo’ they painted the dressing rooms of one of the local Hip Hop / Lifestyle shops called Colour Blind, which really got me hyped on that style they were doing.
In the summer of 1996 I met
@______dabs1 in my hometown but I’ll save that story for a different post.
In the mid 90’s I would frequently take trips to Vancouver. I always made an effort to take the Sea Bus over to North Vancouver and check out the wall where AA would frequently paint their productions on. I really gravitated towards the AA style - well I was a B Boy back then, so I was really into New York nostalgia and anything related to what I saw in Style Wars. It’s a style that influences how I paint even to this day.
Those days, visiting Vancouver and seeing AA’s productions turned out to be important for me for developing style. There were other exceptional writers up at the time too. Shouts to Dedos, Z-Lok, Acrow, Ephx, Crews, Take 5, Tars, Kaput and all the others.
Now 2025, on a recent trip to Vancouver, my homie
@edisonworld took me to a spot where a freshly painted ‘Virus’ was. It’s just crazy to see, that after 30’s years, you can still catch a dope ‘Virus’ piece in Vancouver, and even at the very end of my 40’s I still get the same feeling as when I was young. 🔥
Also, repping that funky west coast style
@tarsizm and
@j_nasty808
There are so many things that influence my style but the Vancouver graffiti scene of the 90’s had a massive impact on my life as a writer.
#virusaa #viruscod #tarsaa #jnasty
