Street Arts
Laced with a both a haunting realism and an otherworldly transcendence of the flesh into the immortal mysteries of identity, the supremely prolific and painfully genuine C215’s work drips with the whirlwind emotions of the human condition. He speaks through the universal language of communication, the human face to the universal elements of our existence and our shared hopes and shattered dreams through savagely emotive, yet silently reflective portraits that define the commonalities of humanity through the fragmentation we all feel so witheringly and all collude in so blindly...This is intangible complexity in all its conflicted clarity and the man himself took a moment for an exchange of ideas with LSD
Can you tell us a little about your background and your early journey...
My life was reasonably stable until the age of 14 when I became a raging drug addict : hash, heroin, coke and moreover LSD. My LSD period was unarguably great for opening up channels of creativity, but led also to a certain self destruction. I traveled with the Nomads alongside Spiral Tribe in the early 90’s until I found myself in jail and was forced to re assess my condition, realising that it was time to get myself clean of drugs and start out on the next phase of my life. I began to study tentatively, before the momentum began to snowball and I eventually found myself with a masters degree in Art History, another in History and 2 bachelors degrees, one in German, and the other in English. I feel at the same time both modern and classic.
What impact did the illegal rave scene have on your creativity and your perception of the world?
It gave me the opportunity to discover that you can be at the heart of a movement that is bigger than you and step outside pure individualism into communal goals, communal living, and a wider purpose. It woke me up to the fact that you don’t need to go to night clubs or museums to experience art, but that you can feel art, create art and be art by yourself, doing it with your mates in unexpected places each with their own intangible character like abandoned warehouses or caves. Ultimately, art is visual poetry, and poetry is always unexpected.
Is there a beauty in the abandoned?
Whatever is abandoned can equally be saved, and that is the essence of romanticism. Abandoned warehouses, asylums and derelict wastelands reflect our own lives, with a strong sense of the ephemeral. We feel small and modest when we weigh our prized individualism against time and the wider universe, and consider how long any of us or anything we do will last within collective memory. Time being stopped in a specific place helps us to understand how short and transient life really is.
What does our attitude to public space say about us as a society?
In today’s Western cities we find ourselves living in an increasingly puritan atmosphere. Under the questionable cover of struggling against crime and terrorism, cities have been cleaned up to the point of obliterating any form of self expression with the glaring exception of branding and corporate advertising. The bottom line is that within in a modern liberal economy, public space exists solely to generate profits for commercial interests through the penetration and shaping of our daily reality - that’s it. It’s up to us to change this scandalous dynamic and speak about the place of human beings in the urban landscape. Raising that voice and letting it ring out and be heard would truly be a new humanism
- Lsd Magazine Interviews Russian Artist P183
A complex artist and a complex man - this is nothing quite so simple as political art. It is a proudly Russian voice striving for spiritual and mental freedom and the realisation of his country’s true potential. While creating some extraordinarily...
- Lsd Magazine Interviews - Indigo (canada) (issue 5)
Rippling gently with the stillness of whispered emotion frozen into a moment, Indigo’s soft serenade of stencil and spray over the last two years has graced our universal public spaces with profound echos of an intangible dream. A stunning photo-realism...
- Lsd Magazine Interviews - Rero (issue 5)
Consciously sidestepping an image based aesthetic to combat the visual saturation of our generation, French artist Rero uses his minimalist Verdana texts to challenge accepted notions of private property and the lines of ownership we draw around places,...
- Lsd Magazine Interviews Graffiti Legend Mear One - Issue 4
If the apogee of the graffiti artform is the hijacking of commercially numb public space to question, provoke and elevate the viewer into a higher state of reflective consciousness then Mear One is spraying up the cutting edge. Unifying the psychedelic...
- Out Of Sight — Urban Art/abandoned Spaces Book By Romanywg
UK photographer and Urban explorer Romany WG is releasing another book titled Out Of Sight - Urban Art/Abandoned Spaces. Following on from his last book Beauty in Decay: The Art of Urban Exploration also published by Carpet Bombing Culture,...
Street Arts
LSD Magazine Interviews - C215 (Issue 5)
Laced with a both a haunting realism and an otherworldly transcendence of the flesh into the immortal mysteries of identity, the supremely prolific and painfully genuine C215’s work drips with the whirlwind emotions of the human condition. He speaks through the universal language of communication, the human face to the universal elements of our existence and our shared hopes and shattered dreams through savagely emotive, yet silently reflective portraits that define the commonalities of humanity through the fragmentation we all feel so witheringly and all collude in so blindly...This is intangible complexity in all its conflicted clarity and the man himself took a moment for an exchange of ideas with LSD
Can you tell us a little about your background and your early journey...
My life was reasonably stable until the age of 14 when I became a raging drug addict : hash, heroin, coke and moreover LSD. My LSD period was unarguably great for opening up channels of creativity, but led also to a certain self destruction. I traveled with the Nomads alongside Spiral Tribe in the early 90’s until I found myself in jail and was forced to re assess my condition, realising that it was time to get myself clean of drugs and start out on the next phase of my life. I began to study tentatively, before the momentum began to snowball and I eventually found myself with a masters degree in Art History, another in History and 2 bachelors degrees, one in German, and the other in English. I feel at the same time both modern and classic.
What impact did the illegal rave scene have on your creativity and your perception of the world?
It gave me the opportunity to discover that you can be at the heart of a movement that is bigger than you and step outside pure individualism into communal goals, communal living, and a wider purpose. It woke me up to the fact that you don’t need to go to night clubs or museums to experience art, but that you can feel art, create art and be art by yourself, doing it with your mates in unexpected places each with their own intangible character like abandoned warehouses or caves. Ultimately, art is visual poetry, and poetry is always unexpected.
Is there a beauty in the abandoned?
Whatever is abandoned can equally be saved, and that is the essence of romanticism. Abandoned warehouses, asylums and derelict wastelands reflect our own lives, with a strong sense of the ephemeral. We feel small and modest when we weigh our prized individualism against time and the wider universe, and consider how long any of us or anything we do will last within collective memory. Time being stopped in a specific place helps us to understand how short and transient life really is.
What does our attitude to public space say about us as a society?
In today’s Western cities we find ourselves living in an increasingly puritan atmosphere. Under the questionable cover of struggling against crime and terrorism, cities have been cleaned up to the point of obliterating any form of self expression with the glaring exception of branding and corporate advertising. The bottom line is that within in a modern liberal economy, public space exists solely to generate profits for commercial interests through the penetration and shaping of our daily reality - that’s it. It’s up to us to change this scandalous dynamic and speak about the place of human beings in the urban landscape. Raising that voice and letting it ring out and be heard would truly be a new humanism
READ ENTIRE C215 INTERVIEW IN LSD MAGAZINE ISSUE 5 - ONLINE HERE
- Lsd Magazine Interviews Russian Artist P183
A complex artist and a complex man - this is nothing quite so simple as political art. It is a proudly Russian voice striving for spiritual and mental freedom and the realisation of his country’s true potential. While creating some extraordinarily...
- Lsd Magazine Interviews - Indigo (canada) (issue 5)
Rippling gently with the stillness of whispered emotion frozen into a moment, Indigo’s soft serenade of stencil and spray over the last two years has graced our universal public spaces with profound echos of an intangible dream. A stunning photo-realism...
- Lsd Magazine Interviews - Rero (issue 5)
Consciously sidestepping an image based aesthetic to combat the visual saturation of our generation, French artist Rero uses his minimalist Verdana texts to challenge accepted notions of private property and the lines of ownership we draw around places,...
- Lsd Magazine Interviews Graffiti Legend Mear One - Issue 4
If the apogee of the graffiti artform is the hijacking of commercially numb public space to question, provoke and elevate the viewer into a higher state of reflective consciousness then Mear One is spraying up the cutting edge. Unifying the psychedelic...
- Out Of Sight — Urban Art/abandoned Spaces Book By Romanywg
UK photographer and Urban explorer Romany WG is releasing another book titled Out Of Sight - Urban Art/Abandoned Spaces. Following on from his last book Beauty in Decay: The Art of Urban Exploration also published by Carpet Bombing Culture,...