Graffiti News & Blog

Nice Interview on Juxtapose:

D*Face (Juxtapoz #98) is the poster boy for raw talent, passion, and humility, and with international appeal, a sell-out show, and even people inking themselves with his work. D*Face is definitely considered one of the best contemporary artists of today. Helen Soteriou went to the East End of London to spend some time with him.

Helen Soteriou: Who is D*Face, can you tell me about your background and how the D*Face journey began?

D*Face: D*Face is a government experiment. No, D*Face is me, Dean Stockton.

‘How did D*Face start’? It started 10 years ago. ‘How did ‘it’ start’? It started when I was a kid. It is hard to define D*Face outside of defining who I am as a person. What my work is about is what I’m about. It started when I was a kid, bored at school again, not academic in the slightest….Mum’s frustration: ‘What is my son going to become’? He is failing all his schooling’, but was really interested in drawing and art and skateboarding, and she bought me the book Subway Art / Spray Can Art stupidly, didn’t have any idea that I’d like it and it might be interesting and something for me to be into… and it was… but it was kinda the wrong thing for me to be into… and that kinda led me into, in a very strange way, a couple of kids at school who were into skateboarding as well as graffiti, so I would get hand-me-down Thrasher magazine from 82 / 83, and they would get it sent over from America cause at that time it was quite hard to get it from the UK… and it was Thrasher magazine and Transworld where I opened those pages and saw those skateboarders and skate graphics. I was gob-smacked and thought ‘what the fuck is this all about’ and I really liked the ethic of going against the grain and skateboarding WAS that sort of graffiti.

Honestly, I was too young to be into graffiti at that time. I tried. I got pens and cans of paint out of my dads garage and tried to tag but they were shit and I was by no means going to be a big graffiti artist or bomber, but what I did do was get into skateboarding heavily and got into the graphics side of that.

Thrasher magazine always had punk bands featured and that got me into Thrash music and punk music, and those things formed me as this person and taught me to look at the city differently, like there wasn’t these skate parks around and there really isn’t that many today, but what there were, were objects that were skateable and we would skate around with my mates and look at architectural pieces that did have a skateboard use, so we used to skate at Southbank …and those things teach you to look at the city differently, and if anything, that was the biggest influencing factor to me as an artist.

Fast forward a couple of years: I failed school. I managed to get myself onto a course studying photography, because I wanted to become a skateboard photographer. I had this blindsided idea that I could be this great photographer, but never really take any photos – just get stoned in the car park- which is what I did for 2 years, and then I had the dawn of realization that I was not a very good photographer at all and no one was going to take me in, so had the thought that actually I’m going to have to get a job.

My mum got me a job in her bank as some sort of clerk, and I was thinking this is the last thing fucking thing I wanted to do in my life, and I looked around, I phoned around colleges and asked whether they had any places on animation / design / illustration courses and one course came-up, and I went down with my portfolio and I got a place on an animation course. When I started that course it cemented all of my interests in that this is what I want to do; it was animation. It was a cartoon graphic style. There was an outlet for it and there was a way where I could be tutored and taught how to create interesting graphics that inspired me, much like the skateboarding graphics I had seen when I was a child. Then I started working really hard and I connected to all the things I was interested in …and not long after I went on to get a job in the design and illustration world.

Helen Soteriou: How did you come-up with the idea for the characters?

D*Face: I was always into cartoons. It was always something that interested me. I collected cartoon characters and crazy shit like that for a long time. I guess I was thinking ‘I want to put something up in the street that interests me’. There was no great idea to it, I was just bored sitting at my desk and I was drawing on paper in the way you just doodle something – there is no beginning or end to it. I was just doodling characters, and I had a mate who was working with me and we were in the same boat – bored out of our minds, and we would check-out each others characters, and he was really madly talented and said you should continue doing that and then I thought I won’t just draw it on a paper I’ll draw it on vinyl and stick them up on the way home…and that was that.

One character needs to have a pet as another character, and you know they start having this little world, and really the one character ‘the dog’ as I named it, sort-of prevails, just because it is quite flexible to work with and use, and that was the beginnings of it.

How did you come-up with the name D*Face?
It is really crap. It is such a boring story. Basically at the time I was drawing on empty advertising space and someone said to me ‘I’ve seen these faces around’ and it sounded like ‘Deface’ and so I was like, that is kinda cool, and someone said you should be ‘D e Face’ and so I said no it should be D* Face. The stories of most people’s names are pretty crap. I don’t know anyone who has a good name.

Are you discrete when you put up stickers?
From 2000 onwards to probably up until 3 years ago CCTV in London was non existent. I remember putting-up posters in Oxford Street on Thursday evening and nobody said a word, but it is a different thing now. When people say something now, I say it is a sticker, so what, big deal. It is hardly a crime, but certain people see it otherwise. I have never tried to hide putting stickers up and that and so what.

For me, it is like, the lamp post is there. It is there for the stickers. Nobody asks me whether they should paint it grey or black, so I should not have to ask someone’s permission to put a sticker on it. In fact, they are much better when they have a couple of stickers on them; they are far more interesting for passers-by, whereas with a grey or black box there is no dialogue-visual or otherwise for any passer-by.

Do you do eavesdrop at your gallery shows / on the street?
Never.

I never hang around. Only recently I have started going to the shows, before I would not even turn-up to them. I prefer people not to know who I am. It does not benefit my work at all. My art should be judged on the merits or the downfalls of the work itself. Whether you like or dislike me is irrelevant.

I’d rather not be in the spotlight at all, and also if you hear positive or negative comments you cannot help but take them on board. If someone says ‘that is the greatest thing you have ever done’ then when you are creating your next body of work, you hold that nugget of information in your head and think ‘maybe I should do something along those lines’. If someone says ‘I really didn’t like what you did there’, particularly peoples opinions who count, peoples opinions who I don’t know, I don’t care about their opinions at all. But if they say ‘I really liked that’ or ‘I really hated that’ and you see it as the best thing you have done in your life, you are going to say ‘oh shit, maybe I should not continue doing those’. So, either way it has a negative connotation to me, in my opinion. It started as my own self-indulgent act and I prefer to keep it that way.