Jason Burnz is a well-known graffiti, fine art, and commercial illustrator hailing from New York. Jason will be showing off works and live painting at a skating and art event sponsored by Gatorade tonight in The Cayman Islands. After hanging out with the artist today, we got to talking about his past, the current graffiti scene, and why big handstyles seemed “the closest thing we had to actually being a superhero like Batman.”

You're an NYC based 'jack of all trades.’ You're an illustrator, graffiti artist, and graphic designer. Can you briefly give us some insight into your story: your background, your choice of medium, and how you ended up where you are now?

Jason Burnz: When I was a little kid my grandfather lived in downtown Manhattan. I remember driving in my parents car around NYC and seeing a lot of classic legible graffiti. Big legible names on highways stood out to me as well as nice print handwriting styles. I thought this was exciting, and that these people were the closest thing we had to actually being a superhero like Batman.

Sneaking around at night, climbing things and drawing their names. As soon as I was old enough to really venture out on my own, this was the first thing I really wanted to do after skateboarding.

Jeer4 was the first real writer I ever met; he took me on my first serious missions. Then a few years later around 1997 I linked up with Ovie KD, Kerz UW, and Rath UPS. I learned a lot of things from them about style and approach, and eventually ended up learning traditions directly from legends like Cope, Tkid, Wane, Dash, Mare139, and several others.

Being part of the Ironlak team has really expanded my network as well. Over the last few years I've gotten to collaborate with a lot of really amazing/talented people such as Askew, Enue, Rime, Persue, Vans, Sirum, the MSK crew, and the Supervision guys from Chicago. Huge thanks to them, and everyone along the way.

My history in design is a completely different mode of my life from being a graffiti writer. I've been doing it for 10 years, and in the last few years I've focused more on the things I love to do, which are illustration and custom typography. I've gotten to work with some pretty fun brands like Ecko, LRG, Flud Watches, and other various large clothing brands and now Gatorade. This turned out to be a really fun project for me being that it’s skateboard related. Skateboard graphics were always very inspiring for my artwork growing up.

Right now my preferred choice of mediums is definitely spray paint, pen and ink, and digital illustration. I'm pretty impulsive though, and enjoy most means of artistic communication.

Being a graffiti artist can, at times, be a label that follows you for the rest of your life. Are you comfortable with being called a graffiti artist still? What do you think of the current scene?

I don’t mind being titled a graffiti artist at all. I think what people can get from graffiti is, for the most part, completely up to them. You’re not going to get arrested for painting a canvas, so if you end up in a jail cell or in a gallery, you got there based on your own actions. That being said, I think it’s kind of silly to get into graffiti expecting a career out of it. I'd like to think of that situation as the opposite for me; my career supports my ability to do graffiti, not the other way around.

The currant state of graffiti is pretty exciting worldwide right now. Talented people from all over the world are connecting via the internet, and styles are cross-breeding, much like the concept of the Exchange project. Art Basel ended up being an all star graffiti event this year, which was really cool and unexpected. Some of us were hanging out one night after the Primary Flight show and discussed some history of artistic mediums. It turns out that acrylic paint has only been commercially available since the 1950s, and at first was not considered a respectable medium. But, over time that changed and was eventually accepted. An amazing amount of great graffiti got handled this year on the exterior walls of the galleries in Miami. I think most people left there agreeing that the quality of work was more exciting in the streets than in the galleries.

Graffiti has taken off in a big way the past decade. Where do you see the art form, culture, and focus heading in the next decade?

Well, graffiti is a tough thing to predict the direction it’s going because graffiti is so many things. It's a lifestyle, it’s an art form, it’s vandalism, it’s a visual form of communication, it’s self advertising, and its a craft, a craft of mastering and exploring the alphabet stylistically, and mastering its traditional mediums.

I would like to see more graffiti writers take their work to a professional level in general. There's no reason why the most talented people in this culture shouldn't get paid to do what they do. Graffiti is an art form that’s embraced primarily by youth culture. Lots of corporations shell out millions of dollars to get in touch with a teenage demographic, but so few people actually do graffiti for a living. I'd like to see that change and improve. My crew-mate Persue COD wrote an article about how much graffiti has in common with skateboarding. Pro-skateboarders get professionally contracted to just skate, explore their personal style and creativity in the sport, wear products from the brands that sponsor them, push the boundaries, and win contests. I'd like to see graffiti go a similar route if it were to become more of an accepted profession.

Your piece created for Gatorade involves a lot of color and appears to be done in aerosol. Can you tell us a bit about the process and inspiration for this logo?

The final piece I did for this project is what I describe as an explosion of “ism's” or “graffiti-isms” being a term used to describe individual elements incorporated into graffiti artwork to add style to your work.

The only rule in this project was to incorporate the Gatorade G logo unmodified, so I got the biggest canvas available and decided to do an explosion of ism's centered in a vanishing point behind the logo. The entire thing is done with spray paint. Spray paint is a very versatile medium, you can achieve really detailed clean vector-like features with it, as well as very soft blend effects. This piece was a combination of both.

As a graphic designer, you must do a lot of commercial work. How do you approach commercial versus fine versus personal work?

Where creative and professional fields meet is a never-ending learning process. I spent the first half of the last 10 years working for major clothing companies and painting on the weekends. Then one day it hit me, and I realized how painting was the one thing that felt right in my life, and made it priority #1 again. I enjoy the process of getting lost in my personal work, as opposed to how deadlines often limit creativity in professional work.

You're now attending Gatorade's massive Black Pearl skating and urban art event in the Cayman Islands. Talk about what you're up to while down here?

Gatorade has invited me to participate in an artist series collaboration project where I painted a canvas and did a time-lapse video project. This weekend we've jumped off this event in the Cayman Islands where I’m doing a live painting demonstration. I'm pretty excited about it because skate culture and graffiti share so much in common. I like helping people understand more about what we do.

What do you have lined up for the rest of 2010?

Lots of painting, more video projects, travel, more personal exploration in fine art and design, and hopefully some more fun brand collaborations. There's only a few guys I can think of who have seemed to have built an exciting art/design careers from a graffiti background. There's no reason why that list should be so small. Unfortunately most artist collaboration projects from the last 10 years have been centered around the same handful of people.

As far as design work, I'm currently working on a type foundry project. Being that I've spent more than half my life involved in trying to reinterpret the alphabet, it seemed to make sense to explore the idea of creating fonts to share with the rest of the world.

Another project I'm currently working on is curating a sculpture show of NYC handwriting styles. I think a lot of people have dedicated so much of their lives to creating beautiful and unique handwriting styles, but for some reason haven't been able to implement their talents into the fine art world. My goal with the sculpture project is to help push graffiti into the gallery scene in a medium galleries don't expect from graffiti artists. This is my way to benchmark the era I grew up in, to share with the world some style history of NYC, and to say thank you to some pioneers in the seemingly lost tradition of handwriting styles.

More on Jaes aka Jason Burnz at www.JasonBurnz.com and

www.JasonBurnz.wordpress.com

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