Five questions for five flicks 

Featured artist - WOTIFS

WOTIFS is a graffiti writer from Canberra. He first discovered graffiti at a young age in grade 6 and has done his fair share of travelling and painting since then. His style is fresh and always with great colour schemes. We caught up to find out a bit more about him and asked for his favourite five flicks.

1. What got u into graffiti?

I got into graffiti in 1996, I was in grade 6 and my older brother and his friends were skating, bombing, smoking weed and racking a lot. So I decided to follow the leader and started. My first piece I did said NME and was all Solarsrtream's I'd inched from Woolworths. It wasn't too bad, really (haha). I embarrassed my brother rapidly, by chucking him and his friends up when I did tags, and other toy shit, haha!! I remember one bad move that stitched him up was when I found some bags of Tana that belonged to my brothers friend - Takle ASN. He had stashed them in bushes near our house.

I figured finders keepers, and didn't know they were his when I picked them up, but he thought different. My brother said I had to give them back and I remember saying something like "fuck him, he's a dumb cunt for not stashing them at his house like a normal person" (haha). My brother wanted to work me. He took the tins off me and gave them back to him. Every time I saw Takle from then on he would give me the evil eye, and he nearly ashed me at Spot X one afternoon in 1997 (hahaha if you're from Canberra, you'll know Spot X). I loved that guys graf though, I wished I had styles like him. But really, in Canberra there was just so much good gaffiti everywhere. Seth, Tron, Ayre, Dins, Deft, Rvets, Bose, Rkoe, Prowla, Faroe, Sinch, Smart, Fluke and so many more dudes had crazy style and always blew my mind (the Tron on Hindmarsh Drive was so fresh - and the Airetight at Kambah High School!!).

Bombers would always thrash my primary school (and High School too), it was on the tables and in the study books in my high school, I even remember being about 13 and borrowing Don't Be A Menace To South Central on VHS from the local Video 2000, and the reverse side of the cover was bombed hard by Sorte, so I had a crack at it too! It was in my face no matter where I went. In grade 9 a new kid came to the High School from Melbourne - he wrote Braze, Prek, Der, Piker and a bunch of other names, he was in FMC and he taught me so much about graf, mainly tags and throw ups. Connecting letters and going little to big with your handstyles, he drew me an alphabet, that kind of dedicated teaching. We are still good friends today too. Seppy aka Kruse / Drucks influenced me the most - RIP BRO.
Floer always had mad handstyles too, if you were around 2902 back then, you'd know Floer had mad skill with the marker. Toro also did some cool throw ups. It was a great moment in time in the 90's!

2. How would you describe your style?

 

3. Do you have a good chase story?

I've had some pretty full on chases, but the craziest, most recent ones were in Berlin. I had been painting about 15 minutes at the spot , the fumes were so bad, and I was on my own. I heard a whistle while doing my outline and could hear some movement not too far off. I finished my panel shot flicks and climbed up from the spot and onto the bridge, I had left a water bottle where I'd climbed down, so I grabbed it as I climbed over, and a security guard appeared and started to speak to me (presumably telling me that I was done for). He grabbed me as I started to run away from him.

I told him to let me go or I would hit him and he held me in such a way that even with a long reach on me I couldn't chin him, so the only way I could get him to let go, was to hit him with my water bottle. I hammered the base of it into his face a few times. I broke his glasses, and it dropped him proper (poor bastard), as soon as he released me I hit the legs, the police arrived almost immediately after he hit the ground, they ran to his assistance and then followed me. Because of that, I had almost 50m on them and I lost them. But I could hear their footsteps behind me. By this point I was running so fast my bag had opened and my empty tins were flying out of it, I found a good spot to hide in some bushes at a block of apartments, and stashed my remaining shit about 10 meters from where I was going to hide.

I was lying face down, I was that wrecked from running for so long my asthma was worrying me and I was close to vomiting. I was trying to keep my breathing quiet watching the police drive up and down the street constantly. I heard the sound of cans rattling and voices nearby, so I knew it was them. A mosquito was biting my hand and I had to watch it do me a few times, because if I had of made one sound they'd have found me, they were that close but I couldn't see them. They moved on after what seemed like 30 minutes but was probably less than 5. The police cars continued to patrol slowly for the next hour or, so I stayed put. After some time, I decided to make a move and flagged a taxi down soon after (luckily), and got the fuck outta there and a lift to a bottle shop. Once I got a bag full of John Deers I got back to the hostel, rolled a nice big victory zoot and shared it with some other travellers. Go Germany! 

 

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