Can-slingers shake themselves up

Published on Friday 18 September 2009 18:59

BY ITS very nature, street art is democratic. The anonymous spraycan-slingers who decorate our cityscapes while we sleep are mostly private people who choose to hide their true identities, but the work they produce is intended to be seen by everyone. It's not about "look at me" so much as "look at this".

It makes sense, then, that graffiti and the internet have been madly in love with each other from day one. Paint something on the side of a derelict building and it can be seen by hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in your town – at least until somebody from the council arrives to clean it off. Take a picture of that painting, though, and post it online and it can be seen by millions of people all over the globe. It can stay there indefinitely too. As London-based street art gallery owner Steve Lazarides points out in the introduction to his 2008 book, Outsiders: "What other museum is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no entry fee?"

The internet has long been a place where street artists show their work, but a new exhibition opening this weekend at Glasgow's Recoat gallery featuring work by two Scots, Elph and Lyken, suggests that the web may now be starting to take on an additional function for the street art community.

Thanks to the proliferation of open- access design software websites such as www.al.chemy.org, the internet now has the potential to become a key tool in the street artist's toolbox, alongside spraypaint and stencils.

Lyken explains: "We've been taking elements of what we do – graffiti lettering mostly – and we've been putting them into these computer programs which give you a kind of random element. So if you try to draw a line it will then take your hand in a direction where you might not otherwise have gone."

Elph shows me some images he's been working on. "See how on this one the letters are all made up of speakers and lighting rigs?" he says. "Those shapes all came from the program. So when I drew this I drew the basic shape and all these smaller shapes within it just appeared.

"The first website I found where you can do this is al.chemy, but since then I've ended up going off and finding a whole world of these online drawing applications. There are a lot of them out there and they're all free. Sometimes they're not even created for drawing. Some of them are on science websites and they're for generating organisms and stuff like that, but we've been using them in a creative way. You do a drawing and then it busts your drawing up into amoebas."

The work Elph and Lyken have made for their Recoat show is mostly based on letter forms, and it has been produced in two stages. First, the artists develop basic shapes, using programs such as al.chemy to take them off in new and unexpected directions.

Then, using print-outs of these shapes as preliminary sketches, they create scaled-up versions using good, old-fashioned paint on canvas.

Even after they have filtered their different mark-making techniques through the randomising process of various online design programs, they can still tell whose pictures are whose. Many of the pieces Lyken has made for the show have an organic feel to them. In one canvas he shows me, masses of tiny blobs of paint coalesce to form what look like primitive organisms. Elph's work, on the other hand, tends to have a more mechanical vibe.

"It's funny," says Lyken, "your own individual style still come across. The programs make everything random enough to push you away from what you'd normally do, but when you put it all together at the end it's quite bizarre how it still essentially looks like stuff that you would do anyway."

Now veterans of the Scottish graffiti scene, Elph and Lyken first met at a graffiti jam in Livingston in 1994. Lyken came down from his home in Dundee and didn't have anywhere to stay, so he ended up staying with Elph. The pair discovered they had a lot of interests in common, from sci-fi movies to comic books, and they have frequently painted together since, although the forthcoming Recoat exhibition will be the first gallery show they've done together.

In addition to the main gallery space, the pair will also be taking over Recoat's back room, papering the walls with blueprints pilfered from a disused paper factory somewhere in Fife and then painting over them.

"I suppose what we've been doing for this show is almost like an experiment," says Elph, "so the idea is to build something like a laboratory in the back of the gallery – or a room like you see in films where they're chasing a serial killer and they've got lots of photos pinned to the walls."

&#149 Haunted Graffiti. New Work by Elph One & Lyken Love is at Recoat, Glasgow, today until 18 October. Tel: [phone] / www.recoatdesign.com