LiV’s First Friday Review: Ben Eine @ Andenken

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This is the era of stencil art, or so I’ve observed for a number of years, & UK artist Ben Eine is right in the middle of it. Yeah, when it comes to stenciling we’ve seen it all, right? But sometimes the magic is in the delivery itself. Let’s face it, his work looked really damn cool on the wall. Row after row of square typographical splendidness. And if you read into the messages, something interesting is happening there, too.

“Letters & colors” are his favorite thing. He also admitted to creating graffiti for years. “I just drew all the time… & I did it until I didn’t need a full time job anymore.”

Bravely, I talked with him for a while, adjacent to his alphabet & adjective pieces, trying not to be intimidated by a guy who is such a success at following his dreams (AKA “going with the flow”). He’s really, really smart. Very chill, as far as I could tell. Adventurous, too. He’s been working hard these last two months, preparing hundreds, I estimate, of stencils for his big debut in America. Then as soon as he got here – 10 days prior to the show – he “worked like a looney” to get them done. I counted 7 sets of themes, from the gray evils of vandalism to happy faces formulated by repeating EINEs, & a few miscellaneous out in the big room by the DJ. But my favorites were within arms length of our conversation.

I asked him about a few of them, about one in particular that I liked from the set that I regretfully didn’t get any photos of, the colorful alphabet in custom circus-y typography on black. “I was on the way over here & somewhere I saw a P & an M that I liked, & built the rest of the lettering around that.” It was then that I realized the uniqueness of his work & his obvious passion & knack for hand lettering.

“When I used to do graffiti,” Eine said, “I never wrote the same thing twice. A lot of people did that, and still do, write their name, for example, over & over. But I’ve always liked how letters could fold into other letters, so I wrote different words all the time.”

In my excitement, like a dumbass, I forgot to ask about the purpose for this particular show, about his themes, before he rode off into the sunset to smoke a cigarette outside. But I did remember to ask to take his picture in front of one of his awesome sequences. In colorful custom stars, “HELL” repeated across four canvases (canvi?), & appropriately so since Lord Almighty it was the damn hottest day of the whole damn summer. “Stay cool,” I said as the conversation ended… something I meant in more ways than one.

Comments

  1. Neal May August 18, 2008

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