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I was already sketching a lot, (I have some photos of me painting a wall when I was just a kid) so I guess I already had it in me. Do you have any family history with drawing or painting? My mom was doing a little bit of oil painting and I was collecting a lot of comics – that was like one thing that drew me in to the sketching world. The other thing was that I was working as an altar boy for the church; we had a very beautiful painted church, like ceiling and everything, so my job was to hold a candle for hours and basically stare at the ceiling. Combined with the comics, the idea of painting on walls kind of developed naturally. Where was your first drawing? It was on an old water tower in Buchloe. It actually appeared in the newspaper two days later, so I thought that’s so cool, you actually get reactions from it, so I continued until I bombed the whole town. And then we moved to Munich. But I grew up in Buchloe, Schwaben. I was pretty much a countryside boy – the mountains were almost outside my door. So how come, while growing up in a remote village in the middle of nature, you thought about writing on walls? There was nothing there. The only thing you could’ve maybe seen was a political phrase on a wall. The idea of doing pieces actually sparked when the sister of a friend of mine came back from New York city in 1982. She was an exchange student there so she got the chance to listen to rap, to see graffiti and all that before the media was on it. She brought over all the stories, the photos and everything so that’s how I heard for the first time about the subway cars, painted from top to bottom. By that time
Chiar dacă e la el acasă, Loomit nu e deloc uşor de găsit. Am ajuns la el după ce am primit, printr-o coincidenţă maximă, numărul (ultrasecret) de la atelierul său de la un amic comun fotograf. Am vorbit mai întâi cu un robot, după care m-a sunat imediat înapoi băiatul ăsta pus pe glumiţe şi povestit, total încântat că o să aibă un material într-o revistă românească.
După ce mi-a descris timp de un sfert de oră ce-a făcut recent în China (discuţie pe care din păcate nu pot s-o redau pentru că am uitat-o), ne-am întâlnit în mijlocul celui mai murdar loc din München, Kultfabrik, un fel de complex sinistru de cluburi şi baruri, plin până la refuz de desenele lui (dar mai ales de colaborări internaţionale – de la The London Police la Peeta şi până la Os Gemeos); jumătatea de oră pe care o aveam la dispoziţie s-a transformat în două ore şi-n vreo trei căni de ceai de plante şi a decurs cam aşa. First of all, about your roots… I am Bavarian but I was not born here. I was born in the North, but that’s just because my father was a soldier back then and he was stationed somewhere else. My mom is from here, I was raised here – I spent only one year of my life in my birth town, Celle, which is located in a beautiful part of Northern Germany.
So it was a bomb? Well, that was a… hmm… I actually wrote ‘graffiti’ like a million times, doubling the wrong letters, writing it with a ‘y’; I also tried drawing a character. Then my second one was the skyline of NY and a star, the third was a big fist breaking through a wall – I really had no idea about writing and about styles yet. But that changed when I saw Wild Style on German television in ’83, because the German television had actually financed it. After that I was like yeah, that’s it, I saw how styles were working so I started outlining and everything. How old were you? 15. 16 when I did my first train I guess. The thing is Munich already had a couple of guys doing graffiti and I had no idea who they were, I just saw their pieces
and I felt very encouraged to do more. I actually persuaded one of the guys from my street, who was really good with b-boying, to join me and one night we biked for half and hour to this remote subway station; there were big walls, people passing by in the subway could easily see them. Was it scary? We were young, we had fun, we were standing on the third rail and everything; we knew about the plastic cover and all so we were pretty secure. Plus there was no Police threat, I guess they were not even suspecting it at the time. The Police came, they caught a friend of mine and he dropped my name, so I knew it wouldn’t be cool to hear people talking about what I was doing - so I kept it quiet. And then I found out about the other people doing pieces through a teacher, professor Peter Kreuz. He was teaching at the University for Social Studies