Last week we went along to the Creative Networks 'Artistic Vandal' event with street artist James Jessop. After a sneak peak around the end of year shows showing some future street artists in the making we found Jessop in the courtyard, at play recreating one of his designs ahead of the talk.
Despite the crowd gathered and a number of photographers snapping away Jessop continued to paint almost trance like, until called in for the talk. As soon as Jessop steps up to the mic and starts to talk about his work it becomes clear that he treads a fine line between street artists and vandal.
He talks of bunking off school and stealing the now famous 'Subway Art' by photography legends Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant. On this occasion his 11year old self gets caught and battered by his parents for his troubles, only to be rewarded with his own copy on his 12th birthday.
Jessop clearly had respect and awe for the subway artists of the 1970s, who risked prison sentences, life and limb for their art. He shows a short film of him meeting his heroes including Martha, recreating those iconic shots and talking to the artists behind the work.
He goes on to talk about his own career initially as what he describes as a vandal leaving his tag across London and the south of England. As he grows up he want to know more about art and seeks inspiration from renaissance masters recreating abstract versions of their work.
At first many would have dismissed this cheeky Londoner with an air of shoreditch as a vandal, a graffiti pest leaving his mark and a mess for others to clean. But as the talk goes on and he talks about art history at a level most Oxford born and bred professors would struggle to articulate, he talks about the music scene and how that influences art and more importantly he talks about an 'art', not a way to pass half an hour scrawling his name on the side of a building.
There have been comments on this blog and others about what constitutes street art and sets it apart from lazy vandalism, and nothing answers this argument better than the closing few slides of Jessop's talk.
The camera pans to the same iconic location of one Martha Cooper's photographs. A single bright white, soulless train glides across the track. This could be anywhere, as Jessop says 'now they clean the graffiti off as soon as it happens in New York'.
Compare this scene to the one in 'Subway Art' that inspired Jessop and many others, that gave 1970s New York soul and vibrancy that people from across the globe still seek out, and you start to understand the importance of street art for giving a place it's soul.
There will always be those who are vandals and who seek to destroy, but there will equally be those who seek to add character, life, vibrancy, colour and heart to anodyne, sterilised environments.
[bows as steps off soap box]
For a bit more of an insight to James Jessop here's a link to the man himself: http://www.youtube.
