Belin
Words by Melissa Williams
Belin is a contemporary urban artist true to the nature of modern street culture. In a magical twist of history, skill and beauty, Belin blends Expressionism, Surrealism, Photorealism, graphic design and graffiti into a visual world without boundaries.
Belin grew up in the town of Linares in Spain. As a child he was always interested in drawing and did some art studies in high school that he found boring and uninspiring. He really got sucked into art in 1994 when he first laid eyes on a graffiti magazine: ‘I was totally impressed with what I saw and I just decided to launch to the streets and try to make what I saw in the magazine. I met with friends and we started to make tags and throw-ups. Then I realised that I could evolve and began to make pieces. From that I moved on to doing characters to give a fresh and funny feeling to my graffiti. Of course, not everyone that painted with me continued with the discipline.’
It was only seven years later, in 2001, that Belin really started to take his graffiti seriously and starting working with canvasses and mixed media, progressing on a personal and technical level. ‘When I started to see graffiti as something essential in my life, it woke up my imagination and formed a desire to overcome and I began to make better works.’
In graffiti, Belin (taken from his surname Belinchon) creates tweaked-out surrealist characters that seem to have popped straight out of some bizarre place in your brain onto the city walls. Slender ladies with pelican heads, chicken bodies with human heads and screaming human hands. His fine art consists for photorealistic characters. His older works consisted of elderly people in sombre landscapes and his most-recent pieces have been mostly tonal close-ups of young faces and swirls together his varied approaches with works of fluid expressionist characters. To Belin there are no borders in art; to him art is freedom and he slides through all styles, techniques and mediums to express his liberty.
The FULL interview with BELIN appears in issue 4 of Mynameis? magazine - click here to purchase your copy www.graphotism.com/Subscribe-Graphotism-or-MyNameIs-Magazine.74.0.html
