ESTEVAN ORIOL

(Los Angeles, US)

Estevan Oriol is an internationally celebrated professional photographer, director and urban lifestyle entrepreneur. Beginning his career as a hip-hop club bouncer turned tour manager for popular Los Angeles-based rap groups Cypress Hill and House of Pain, Estevan’s passion for photography developed while traveling the world. With an influential nudge and old camera from his father, renowned photographer Eriberto Oriol, Estevan began documenting life on the road and established a name for himself amid the emerging hip-hop scene.

Nearly 20 years later, Oriol’s extensive portfolio juxtaposes the glamorous and gritty planes of LA culture, featuring portraits of famous athletes, artists, celebrities and musicians as well as Latino, urban, gang, and tattoo counterculture lifestyles. He has photographed Al Pacino, Robert Dinero, Dennis Hopper, Marissa Miller, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Floyd Mayweather, and Lance Armstrong amongst others. He has also produced shoots for internationally-acclaimed photographers such as Ellen von Unwerth for Sang Bleu and Luca Babini for GQ Italy.

His work has been showcased in select galleries and institutions—such as Smithsonian Center for Latino Initiatives, Mesa Contemporary Art Center, Petersen Automotive Museum, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ Art in the Streets exhibit—concluding with a best-selling book of his work: LA Woman, capturing the dangerous and alluring beauty of women shot in his uniquely provocative and raw style. His photography has been featured in Complex, FHM, Juxtapoz, GQ, Vibe, Rolling Stone and other publications, with appearances on popular television shows such as, HBO’s Entourage and Last Call With Carson Daly.

Watch this video of the compelling installment of Oriol's work by Kitte Sencula:

ESCIF

(Valencia, Spain)

Escif is a graffiti artist. He works upon the walls of his home city of Valencia, Spain (and beyond), his arresting black-and-white-and-minimal vignettes depicting strange and thoughtful scenes. The paintings are deceptively simple yet inspired and often incorporate repetitive elements drawn from his personal symbology, which oddly enough may elicit an equally strong response from the viewer.

Black holes; walking walls; tumbling, floating, or falling common objects… there is a mysterious commentary spread over the urban surface that can puzzle and intrigue while somehow making perfect sense. Escif intentions ambiguity in his vertical masonry canvases. When he feels he’s getting tired and predictable, he moves on, looking for new languages that put the past in doubt and reinforce the process of eternal learning.

Escif feels strongly that graffiti removed from the street loses its validity and purpose. The attempts of the established art world to embrace, incorporate, and curate the interventions that a street artist deploys on the walls of the city completely miss—no, lose—the point. He says, “Graffiti as a concept implies transgression of “public” space, and because of this its institutional adaptation ceases to have value.”

Watch this video:

ERICAILCANE

(Bologna, Italy)

Ericailcane is an Italian artist, street artist, illustrator, draftsman and sculptor. He makes graffiti worldwide. According to the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago, Ericailcane "belongs to the new generation of European street artists that have revolutionized how to design public space".

The works of Ericailcane are characterized by scientific precision. The artist presents different variations of disturbing animals human-like, in strange contexts, sometimes charged with a social or ecological significance. He often depicts majestic, unpleasant or monstrous figures resembling the Middle Ages. These aquatic or terrestrial animals are often drawn fighting in more or less hostile or adverse environments. The same iconography is used in its refined drawings in his books, in his collages, in her videos and installations, such as the huge puppet presented in 2009 in Bologna for traditional Vecchione, traditionally burned at midnight December 31 in the Maggiore plaza.

Watch this video of the making of a mural in Bastardilla:

EMPTE EYES

EMILY J. MOORE

(South Dakota, US)

Emily is an artist and illustrator currently residing in Denver, Colorado.  She was born in a small town in South Dakota and grew up with her parents and younger brother in the suburbs of Kansas City, MO.  Emily moved to Colorado to pursue her art at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 2009.  She graduated in the spring of 2012 with a BFA in Illustration. She works in a variety of mediums, both traditional and digital.  Her figurative mixed media work is deeply personal.  She likens each piece to a journal entry and a brief visual representation of a moment in time.

ELICSER

(Toronto, Canada)

With a gritty-soft pallet of distorted figures, teetering tree houses, jumbled skylines, and even infamous hug-me trees, Elicser Elliot is arguably Toronto’s best loved of graffiti artists. A graduate of the Illustration at Sheridan College, he has been producing and showing work in Toronto for almost twelve years. 

Elicser’s outdoor work has ranged from collaborations with the vast majority of Toronto’s top underground artists on murals and grassroots art shows, to being a staple at the Toronto Jazz Festival and Harbourfront Centre. His prolific output has also been featured and reviewed in publications such as Mix Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Spacing and NOW Magazine.

Using artistic skills honed on the alleyways of Toronto, Elicser’s gallery practice often consists of free-form collages -- soft character work mediated by his experiences and relationships with others, and highly improvised found-object experiments.

Watch this video by Wonder Cafe:

EINE

(1970, London, UK)

The prolific street artist Ben Eine (Ben Flynn) is best known his series of spray-painted letter murals on storefront shutters along London’s Middlesex Street, or “Alphabet Street”, as it has become known. Eine’s trademark colorful typography adorns streets in cities all over the world, including LA, Mexico City, and Tokyo, and the artist also creates indoor installations and produces works on canvas in spray paint, acrylic, and glitter. Eine gained worldwide recognition when British Prime Minister David Cameron presented one of his works to President Obama during a state visit. He was also invited to participate in Banksy’s 2008 “Cans Festival” in London.

Watch this documentary:

DYLAN MADDUX

(Los Angeles, US)

Dylan dove into the world of photography in 1999 when he moved to San Francisco where he spent the next 12 years perfecting his craft. Most of his time was spent in Lower Haight, a district that would ultimately shape his signature style. He began working with the newly established clothing company/gallery Upper Playground and shot the works of artists the company represented at the time. His other early works consisted mainly of hip-hop editorials and advertising in the skateboard industry. From there he moved onto street photography shooting portraits of street hustlers, gang members, and “the sexy girls next door”.

His photography has been published in both domestic and international publications including Intersection (UK), Warp (Japan), Slap, Thrasher, Juxtapoz, Mass Appeal, and Swindle. He was also one of ten photographers to be published in Juxtapoz Photo, the book.He has shown at many galleries including YBCA (SF), FTC (Japan), Known Gallery (LA), BACC (Bangkok), 1AM (SF), and Cassel Gallery (SF). 

Always in need of a challenge, Maddux has stepped into the world of directing and shooting videos. To date, he’s done numerous video works in Kingston, Jamaica, Hawaii, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and San Francisco.

He has been in Southeast Asia for the last year and a half. Of that time, he spent over a year in Bangkok photographing fashion, red light, and street culture. He has recently moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia where he is currently working on completing his first book.

Watch this video about his exhibition in Cambodia:

DUG-1

Doug Cunningham 'Dug-1' and Jason Noto form Morning Breath. In 1996, the two worked together as the in-house design department at Think Skateboards in San Francisco. There, they began a style of collaborating that would take them into the next decade.

In 2002, Cunningham and Noto formalized their partnership with the creation of Morning Breath, Inc, a boutique studio located in Brooklyn, NY. Since Then, their collaborations have grown beyond skateboard/snowboard graphics to include, music packaging, apparel, advertising, poster design and more. The two have also been part of many showings of their personal work.

Today, Doug and Jason split their creative energies and time between commercial and personal work. Over the last decade the two have been nominated for a grammy, showcased in numerous design books/publications, and have been invited to speak about, and show  their work around the globe.

Watch this Morning Breath video by offthewalltv:

DOZE GREEN

(1964, New York, US)

Doze Green translates complex metaphysical concepts through his paintings, such as the possible manipulation of energy and matter to create a timeless space. He explores meditations on matter and anti-matter, layers of consciousness, and different possibilities based on cosmology.
 

Through stream-of-consciousness painting, Doze Green creates fractured imagery to convey infinite possibilities. His intention is to reveal works with an ever-changing narrative. Multi-dimensional planes and illusion of time are presented through fragmented, incomplete figures. He believes by depicting beings that are not fully materialized, these beings are not of this realm. He presents possibilities of immortality through paintings where narratives are interminable. His collection of paintings is an extension of this metaphysical concept.
 

Cubist influences include ascending and descending planes and repetitive, overlapping, and concentric lines in an otherwise undefined landscape. For Doze Green, this energy and motion of created forms exist in a visual meeting place of ideas. Influenced by Edo period paintings, Doze Green mixes black gesso with Sumi ink and applies “creatively chaotic, and intuitive brushstrokes,” in a calligraphy-inspired and graffiti aesthetic. Doze Green translates these primitive markings as “biological entities, a swarm of arrows coming in from infinite perspective.”

Watch this interview by Walrus TV:

DORA DRIMALAS

(Athens, Greece)

Dora Drimalas is a San Francisco based designer and artist. She was born in Athens, Greece, but grew up in Houston, Texas with her large Greek family.

Dora is a formally trained graphic designer who has worked at Nike's Brand Design Group in Portland, Oregon and Tolleson Design in San Francisco, California. She is currently a principal of Hybrid Design in San Francisco, along with her husband Brian Flynn.

She has taught Communication Design and Branding at the California College of Arts and at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Her work has been nationally recognized by design publications such as Communication Arts, Print and How, as well as several design books. Her artwork has been exhibited in San Francisco, Portland, New York and Malaga, Spain.

DIXON

(Caracas, Venezuela)

A confluence of cultures and contradictions, Juan Carlos Noria 'Dixon' is a painter for our times. As a teen growing up in Ottawa, Canada, he became an accomplished figure skater. Grace and lines were an obsession. So, too were his ideas of subversion. He fell out of skating after hitting the rigid class structure of the sport, finding comfort (and discomfort) in visual art, on the streets with a paint can, postering, skateboarding, fleeing police. 

A strange opportunity then came. A world tour with Disney on Ice. It heightened his sense of absurdity, humour and anger, sharpened his visual and social awareness. Arriving back in Ottawa, he hung up the skates and his career took flight with live painting performances. So proficient from his days of graffiti, he quickly earned a reputation for highly resolved canvases produced in front of appreciative crowds. Through these events in various venues, Juan Carlos also ensured a showcase for other young Ottawa artists, raising the bar and pushing them to achieve with him. 

Juan always with an eye on pop culture and current events, found himself painting with increasing anger. He needed to change the channel. In November 2004, he moved to Barcelona, Spain to find a new view of the world and new audiences.

He sometimes works under the pseudonyms of royal or dixon. He has been infuenced by his contemporaries Mark Marsters, Pat Thompson and Dave Cooper. Yet he is without pretense, full of concern for others, quick to laugh and quicker to paint something ripe.

Watch this video about Dixon by DevotionBCN:

DIET

(San Francisco, US)

Tim Diet began painting in the 80's, sneaking out of his parents' house at night to "tag" alongside his older brother. The graffiti lifestyle immediately drew him in and influenced not only his craft, but his persona and idea factory as well. Diet has traveled across the US, Europe and Japan, just to paint. His recognizable work can be found on streets across the globe, in numerous books and publications, and now in galleries as his unique style continues to develop.

With childhood icons and trademarks representative of current day urban experiences, Tim Diet creates colorfully striking narratives through his juxtaposition of nostalgic imagery. His paintings are cleverly playful, evoking a non-judgmental yet multidimensional perspective of varied modern lifestyles. 

Drawing inspiration from his extensive collection of iconic relics from days past, his work communicates through fresh visual language that vividly connects to a broad audience. 

DIE ANTWOORD

(Cape Town, South Africa)

Die Antwoord is a South African rap-rave group formed in Cape Town in 2008. The group's members are rappers Ninja and Yolandi Visser (often stylized as Vi$er) and DJ Hi-Tek. Their image involves a counterculture movement called zef and the influence of photographer Roger Ballen.

Watch this video of Ninja of Die Antwoord while he paints the walls at FIFTY24SF gallery by Walrus TV:

DETH P. SUN

(San Diego, California, US)

Deth P. Sun is a painter/illustrator currently residing in Berkeley, California. He studied for two years at San Francisco State University, until he transferred to the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he received his BFA in 2002 in Painting and Drawing. 

He exhibits his work about ten to twelve times a year, usually in group shows, but sometimes he takes up a solo exhibition. His work has shown throughout the U.S. and abroad (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Detroit, Portland, New York) for the past few years and he's done illustrations or have contributed stuff to (among other things): Chronicle Books, Giant Robot, Tiny Showcase, Urban Outfitters, Fantagraphics, Poketo, Park Life, The Exploratorium, The Howard Hugh's Medical Institute, The LA Weekly, and Nylon Magazine.

Watch this video of Deth P. Sun's studio in Oakland by Bay Area Vintage Base Ball:

DERRICK SNODGRASS

(Kentucky, US)

Derrick Snodgrass is a self taught artist and tattoo-artist. His work has been exhibited in San Francisco, London and Mexico City. He enjoys drawing and painting surreal kaleidoscopic landscapes, as if seen from the passenger window on a trip to a fantasy world of somnambulation.

For the past 3-4 years Derrick has been best known for his artistic talent, but for years before then he was extremely active in the local music scene. After completing his apprenticeship at Louisville finest shopAcme Ink, he moved to San Francisco to push his skills and become a better tattooist. He currently works atTemple Tattoo in Oakland, CA.

DENNIS MCNULTY

1981. Inauguration and attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. Worst recession since the 30s. Emergence of AIDS. Launch of MTV, the IBM PC, Tattoo You , and the De Lorean. Keith Haring sprays subways, Guernica returns to Madrid, Ali loses his last bout, Sandra Day O'Connor is the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Dennis McNulty, age 6, develops an intense fascination with the patterns, palettes, and compositions of the pinup illustrations, car ads, and images of menswear featured in his father's collection of Playboy. 

Twenty-eight years later, McNulty re-engages the colors, shapes, and layouts of early 1980s men's magazine design, zeroing in on the genre's own re-engagement of the pinup icons of the 1940s and 1950s. Mindful of the broader definitions of "pervert" as both noun and verb, McNulty distorts the quasi-underground tradition of pinup art, presenting it not as nostalgia or historical quotation, but as a subjective, personal aesthetic interpretation. The results are provocative, infused with a disquieting sexual force that is by turns amusing and unsettling.

DENNIS MCNETT

(1972, Virginia, US)

Dennis McNett has been carving surly block prints for over 18 years. His encouragement as a kid came from his blind grandfather, who told him over and over again that his drawings were good. Later influences came from the raw high-energy imagery pouring out of the early 80's skateboard and punk rock scene.

His graphic aesthetic and love for narrative work has been translated in many ways. His work ranges from larger than life Viking ship performances and parades in Philly, resurrecting Nordic giants on West Broadway in Manhattan, Dragon slayings in Oklahoma, masks, installations and sculptures to unique hand-carved wood cut pieces, traditional relief prints, and graphics. 
 

Participating in both the fine art and design worlds, Dennis has been fortunate enough to create series’ for Anti-Hero skateboards, design shoes for Vans, have work fill the windows of Barneys, NY, and participate in the Deitch Artparade. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Juxtapoz magazine, Thrasher and Complex Magazine. 

Watch Dennis in his studio by Vans:

DEB

(Melbourne, Australia)

Deb's females and characters dominate the streets of Melbourne. She paints huge walls, and morphs her creations into species that wow you. And, she does it all in heels. 

Her dolls appeal to men and women alike. They're not brash or conflicting, but easy to embrace, fun, exotic and entertaining to comprehend and toy with. She tackles walls and fine art pieces with an attention to detail and creativeness that we can all admire. 

DAVID CHOE

(1976, Los Angeles, US)

David Choe is an American figure painter, muralist, graffiti artist and graphic novelist of Korean descent. His figure paintings, which explore themes of desire, degradation, and exaltation, are characterized by a raw, frenetic tone that he has termed "dirty style". In the graffiti world, he is identified with the bucktoothed whale he has been spray-painting on the streets since he was in his teens.

Choe wanted to be a comic book creator. In a single night in 1996, he wrote a 35-page book of violent sexual obsession which, coupled with drawings and paintings that he created over the next couple of years, eventually became the graphic novel Slow Jams. Choe initially made about 200 copies of Slow Jams on a photocopier and gave them away at Comic-Con in 1998, hoping to interest a publisher.

In late 2003, Choe arrived in Tokyo. In his first 24 hours he punched an undercover security guard due to a misunderstanding resulting from the language barrier. He was arrested and sentenced to three months in prison for violent assault. During that time, he suffered from loneliness, anxiety and a lack of access to art materials. With small pieces of paper and the one pen his cell was allowed, he made over 600 drawings from prison, including portraits of his Japanese cellmates. He also executed a series of erotic paintings using soy sauce, tea, blood and urine for color. After three months, he was released on the condition that he leave Japan immediately and not return.

Watch the documentary "Dirty Hands The Art & Crimes of David Choe":