Faye (On shutter)

Spray paint on steel shutters. 2.4m x 2.4m

This was the first thing I painted for Upfest. In the run up to the actual festival weekend the shutters on many of the shops along North Street would get painted in the evenings.

As I'd recently painted this same image and was really happy with it, it was easy to do it again. It's always easier painting something you've done before compared to doing something new for the first time.

Something strange happened whilst I was painting this. A girl came up to me with a load of black umbrellas under her arm and asked me to do my tag on one of them, right there and then. Caught off-guard and feeling pressured I scrawled my initials on the curved flappy fabric. It didn't look good. She had explained she was involved in a fashion show and all the models were going to be holding umbrellas with graffiti tags on them. In hindsight I see now what she wanted. She wanted old-skool graffiti bombs, all bubble-lettering and bright colors, covering the whole surface like they are little snippets of wall. I should have explained that that's not really what I do and that I don't have a tag, but back then I was less familiar with the presumptions about street artists that have to be navigated. I never did find out what the fashion show was or whether they used the umbrellas.