Can 2 has been styling the wild across the four corners of the world for over two decades now. With a style that comes fat, furious and bursting with an edgy joy and charisma, his pieces fuse the old, the new and the hip hop tradition into an dazzling explosion of art, life irreverent humour and the street.. Legend to many and inspiration to many more, he took a moment out from his globetrotting to have a word with LSD....
Can you give us a bit of background on yourself...
My Name is CAN2 and I live in Germany. At the tender age of 7 I had a driving need to artistically improve the desk at my school as well as my school books with my own comic style illustrations, but I did my first piece in 1983. Before I got into Graffiti I was into B-Boying. I saw some Music Videos on
TV where kids were spinning on their heads and backs so I started dancing too. Graffiti was mostly shown in the backgrounds of the videos. One night a day before christmas in 1983 me and two friends went out and I did my first Graffiti saying “Windmill”. I got the cans from the garage of my father and it was silver with anthracite outlines. The other two guys were just on the lookout. That was the only outdoor action so far but as soon as ZEBSTER showed me his first sketch I started sketching too. We had like a little battle going on, who’s gonna do the dopest sketch and who got the best colors and the
best fine liner for the white highlights ect... and in 1986 I got my first airbrush so that gave the sketches another quality. Also in 1986 I got the opportunity through my art teacher to do a big wall at my school. Since that time I only wanted to paint on walls.
What does graffiti culture mean to you?
I’ve been doing Graff for more than the half of my Life and I’m still going strong, this fact should answer the question. Graff is my Life. What happened to you in the late 80’s and how did you bounce back In the late 80’s/early 90’s I almost stopped because there was nobody I could really paint with. I concentrated a lot on B-Boying again. It all changed when I moved 1992 to Hamburg for my Illustration Studies with my Old School Partner JASE aka Sonny. And I met so many new writers plus there were quite a few hall of fames so I had my “comeback”.
How has the scene developed in Germany over the time you’ve been painting?
It has developed a lot. A lot of good talents pop up in every city and it is hard nowadays to follow the complete scene. Generally you can say it’s getting better, but sometimes it got strange turnarounds style-wise. That’s when kids follow a strange or wrong trend. The Graff community in Germany has grown a lot and there’s so much going on everywhere. It makes it very hard for an individualist to
stick out of the crowd. You have to do a lot on a high level continuously for years to get recognized.
Full LSD Magazine Interview in Issue 4
Very nice. This is beautiful work.
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