Photo Courtesy of KRVAA
In early July, the internationally famed tag artist, known as Vyal One, began his project painting murals in the windows at the Art Center building, known as Big Red, in Wofford Heights.
The Kern River Valley Art Association (KRVAA) commissioned him for this project he plans to complete.
“I’ll be back up there soon. They want me to paint all of the windows on the building. So I wanted to just go up there and meet everybody and do a little bit of work so that people can see what type of work I do. And then it’s not such a big surprise, or anything like that, when I do paint the rest of the building,” said Vyal One. “I wanted to kind of just give an hors d’oeuvrve, so to speak.”
The inspiration for Vyal One’s projects and style, he explains, is kind of like writing a book, and this is one of the pages. It’s just a continuation of a story that somehow he is illustrating without words. “In my travels I’m trying to connect spaces and connect with the space. So I’ve come to develop this style of painting and imagery that seems to be universal and people’s connection to it. I always put an eye in for the representation of consciousness and the living breathing spaces that we come into as artists sharing our work and collaborating.”
Describing his artistic expression as an organic abstract style, Vyal One says the work incorporates a lot of organic flow, which represents a female energy. “You always hear about masculine energy, of having big buildings and sky scrapers. And I try and reconnect to the feminine with doing more work that’s more fluid, and more organic, and more airy, in a sense, so that it feels very soft. I want people to feel like they can walk into it. I want people to feel like they can touch it and maybe get some dust on their fingers. Like you touch a butterfly wing, you get some of that dust on your fingers. It’s really heavily nature inspired. But it’s a lot of really subtle odds to it,” he said.
“The bubbles that I paint, the bubble to me has always been really powerful, and a really strong image, because it’s literally your breath inside of water. That to me is amazing. I think, today, people take a lot of small things for granted.”
Having grown up in Los Angeles Vyal One explains that there are not too many places where he can connect with nature. So during his professional years he sought to connect with nature and has more recently been looking into investing in property for a wellness center. “Being from the city you’re caught up in the rat race,” he said. “I do need to reconnect often, as it is, to nature. But even when I’m in nature I still want to paint. Places like Kern Valley are really amazing.”
Vyal One has been an artist since his childhood. “When I started to dabble in this type of work, I must have been about 12 years old when I discovered it, and really started paying attention to it.”
He said, places like New York and in Los Angeles, in the late 1980s, early 1990s he was starting to see this type of work in magazines, sold in places one could buy magazines to see artistic work, from around the world, with various artists. And Vyal One was inspired, by seeing those works, to move full speed ahead.
Vyal One participated in an exchange program, in Berlin Germany, in 1995, which was one of his first big projects. Seeing other artists treat their artistic pursuits as a profession inspired him to do the same upon his return to the US.
Growing up in East L.A. Vyal One also saw a lot of the murals, which were painted by local artists, during the 1960s, ’70s, and ‘80s, such as the East Los Angeles Streetscapers. He had so much respect for all the work such artists were doing, which resonated with him.
His work, described by others of the KRVAA as the tagging style, or tag art, was based upon a tagging art culture with which he felt connected early on. A tag is usually a signature or symbol of the artist. He told the Kern Valley Sun that he has since grown beyond that in his pursuits. “As I got older I wanted to do more with the spaces that I was coming across. I wanted to show more appreciation for the places that I was painting, but also the community I was painting in. I wanted it to have more meaningful connections. So early on I was very conscious of that,” he said. “You find time to become this alter ego and you can go around and meet with others that share this passion, that do this type of work (and) collaborate.”
Vyal One created a community events space in Los Angeles, for car shows and other events, that showcases the works of other artists he knows. He is well known as “the guy that paints the eyes.”
He likes the fact people of Kern Valley are not caught up in the asphalt rat race.
