SATURDAY MORNING GRAFFITI

Opake takes the cartoons of his childhood and puts them through a graffiti filter, transforming pop icons into something you’ve never seen before.

-  JONNY WATSON

It doesn’t matter when or where a person grew up: Every child has been told that if you keep watching those cartoons your mind will melt. Most of us have nothing more than vague memories of the countless hours we spent watching Bugs, Daffy, Mickey and Stimpy, but Opake’s artistic sensibilities were formed by Saturday morning cartoons. We spoke with the talented artist about many things, including the way he works pop culture icons into his graffiti, the secret to creating artistic script and the tattoo images he can’t stop going back to.

Do you remember the first time you fell in love with art?

I was 9 and I was on holiday with my family in France. We stopped at a service station and my mum bought me my first copy of “Bomb It” magazine, which I still have on the shelf now. I remember just wanting to find out everything I could about that art form. How it was done, why [it was done] and, mainly, who was doing it. From then on, letter-based graffiti became my obsession and I made it my mission to find out everything I could about it.

When did you know you wanted to become an artist?

I always knew I wanted to do something creative from a really young age. I started painting graffiti from around 13, but when I hit my twenties I got heavily involved in the rave scene (and the nefarious activities associated with it). I was painting and sketching daily but it was purely for my own enjoyment and I hadn’t yet realised this was something I could make a career out of. It was only after getting clean and sober that I really started to focus on pushing my own style of art forward—the disintegration of pop culture.