Replete is a cocktail. The main ingredients include bizarre ideas, a free spirit and a unique sense of reality. Those are mixed with graffiti, fine art, sculpture, VJ and DJing and game design. Once those have been blended, they are then sealed with a dash of mayhem. This may sound more like a recipe for disaster to some, but for this UK writer, it’s all worked out pretty well. graphotism delved into his world and came out with a bag full of thoughts and memories…

Do you remember at what point in time graffiti entered your life?

With a hand-me-down Saisho walkman at the age of 11. The tape that came with it contained one of those contemporary compilations like ‘Now! That’s what I call music’ or ‘Smash Hits’ (like the Quality Street chocolate box selection of the music world). I was inducted into the elements of hip hop via constantly looping the one decent track on the tape, Run DMC’s ‘It’s Tricky’, through my childish cranium.
   After amassing so many hip hop tapes that one friend noted I had, “enough hardcore rap to make a bed out of”, another friend gave me his unwanted collection of Hip Hop Connection magazines. Sandwiched in the well-thumbed pages I stumbled across the graf sections and my eyes were instantly and irretrievably hooked on the wildstyles jumping off the pages. At the time I was living in an isolated town in the North East that didn’t really have any modern subculture to speak of, so the colours and letterforms bewitched me with their arcane incantations that spoke to me of something entirely new but somehow strangely familiar to me.
   Sketches gave way to slinking down the paint aisles at the local car parts store under the guise of, “I need some car paint to paint my BMX”. With a payload of paint in my Puma Sport schoolbag, I ventured forth into the all embracing, forgiving-and-forgetting cloak of the night.

With your love for videogames and a history in the industry, did you automatically bring a gaming style into your writing?

At first I went down the familiar route of adapting the styles of favourite writers, in the beginning that was the work of Shok1 and Skore. They stood head and shoulders off the pages of Hip Hop Connection. There was always an analogy with games within graf as both can be broken down into the constituent parts of characters, backgrounds and fonts. But other than that, my graffiti was styled on the hip hop ethos and those pioneers that came before me rather than anything contained within a videogame.

Your DJing and VJing is a direct expression of music. What kind of impact has music had on your work?

Music is entirely essential to me and my painting process. I’ll proscribe different doses of sound into my ear canals to get the desired result. Let’s say I’m working on something intricate. In order to engender the right mood, I’ll select something chilled and similar in structure to what I want to envisage and project onto the wall.
   Conversely, if I feel I need to paint faster or more expressively, I’ll dial up something with a high beat count, loaded with energy. Music of this type has the most dramatic effect on a piece as it makes me highly animated, causing me to freestyle, splatting, flicking and boldly applying paint in rapid unrehearsed movements. I get so involved and lost within the track, it takes control of me so that what I paint is a visual representation of the music flooding my head.

Have you always experimented with canvas and sculpture? Was there a particular incident or idea that kick-started your work in those areas?

After I left the games industry in 2000 due to a string of disappointments and being ripped off by shady companies on some original games concepts I’d hatched, I found myself in a quandary as where to direct my life. I relocated to Leeds to give the prospect of marriage a go, only to have it all go stunningly wrong in the most spectacular way.
   Finding myself a smoking wreck of a man I patched myself together as best I could and found the only possible avenue of employment for someone of my malfunctioning state… security. What ensued was two years of the most bizarre, funny, tragic and far fetched escapades in the early hours. At some later date I plan to put pen to paper to document my time as the world’s worst ‘insecurity guard’, as the tales I can tell of that time go beyond belief.
   But to get back on track, one night I found myself guarding a museum repository that stored many historical artifacts. After another night riding the good lady gin and juice I found myself plonked on the back of a stuffed grizzly bear, brandishing a Scottish broadsword and firing an Italian medieval crossbow at a stuffed Siberian tiger. Perched on the large, long dead carnivore, I pondered my predicament. A moment of clarity washed into my addled grey matter and I reasoned that I couldn’t continue this for much longer as I’d end up like the other failed police, military wannabes and assorted unemployable misanthropes that populate the security world.
   My salvation came soon after as Liz, my best friend and girlfriend, mentioned in passing that she knew someone who’d sold a canvas they’d painted on eBay. My time on the nightshifts weren’t entirely squandered as I’d take my laptop along and during the quiet of the early morning, I’d conduct experiments with what I’d learnt in the games industry but applied to creating graffiti. At this point I’d not seen or had anything to do with the graf world for seven years and was totally unaware of the direction it had spun. Working in isolation I came up with 3D forms based on my mangled head state in order to exorcise some of my demons. They evolved and gained a cohesive clarity and steadily increased in complexity.
   The off the cuff canvas remark made by Liz cemented in my head and I knew I had to eject from my security spiral. Taking my last pay cheque and walking out of my job without a word or a look back, I bought 10 blank canvases and set to work. At this point I’d never painted a canvas in my life but I found it instinctive and cathartic to transfer the designs I’d created on my computer, to the clutch of the cotton via the soothing stroke of a brush. Building on the sale of those first 10 canvases, I’ve managed to keep my head above the treacherous waters and fashion a new and better life from the wreckage of the old.

The FULL interview with Replete appears in issue 51 of Graphotism magazine - click here to purchase your copy.