California Graffiti Legend RISK Talks Art, Upcoming Projects and His Life In Constant Motion

Roger Gastman: I’ve heard you were named after a bar. To me, that’s just such a ridiculous wild introduction to you.

RISK: My grandma’s name was Katherine Simmons and her stripper name was Kitty Kelly. She was an original dancer.

Where is this?

I think in Chicago, but she traveled around. She was, as she calls it, “a showgirl.” She ended up in New Orleans with my grandfather who owned a strip joint. He wound up blowing somebody’s head off and got in all kinds of trouble. She ran off to work in another strip joint, left him, and wound up marrying the owner. They later retired and opened a bar/restaurant called Kelly’s because she was Kitty Kelly. I was named after that bar.

Your early memories are in New Orleans, but then it’s quickly to LA and LA is really what shapes you — the surf culture, the punk rock culture, the early hip hop culture. I mean, you are LA subcultures combined.

New Orleans was very important to me, their creativity, the style and drive of the people. But coming out to LA was a big thing. In seventh grade, I quit school. My mom was a teacher and I got in a lot of trouble. She says lets go visit my dad who lived in Lake Tahoe at the time. I landed and saw snow for the first time which was cool and then she tells me: “you like that? Good because you’re gonna live here now.” My dad was a drug dealer, “think you’re a badass?” he said. Then, he hired a teacher to take me from class to class and live with us and do all my schoolwork — everything to get me on track. Right around then, I met Christian Love who was Mike Love’s son [from The Beach Boys]. He exposed me to a lot of things, including marijuana, as well as surf culture, blonde-haired girls, bikinis, skate culture — all the California lifestyle stuff.

A year later, we moved to Manhattan Beach, and I was like, “holy shit, this is all the stuff that I’ve been hearing about from Christian 24/7.” I ran out and got a surfboard at a garage sale and started surfing. I was enthralled. A year later I moved to Palos Verdes, lived on the cliff there and surfed the best waves in California. I was a diehard surfer.

My dad had to move every six months for whatever various reasons so when we moved to LA, I hated all the surfers because I was a longboarder. I had a real rough time and was pretty much an outcast. I was in my own world and was drawing pictures — waves and shit. Some kid at school said, “what do you write?” I’m like, “I don’t write. I draw pictures.” He asked this over and over again. I almost got in a fight with him because

“motherfucker, I don’t write, I draw.” He told me about the subculture of writing. He showed me pictures of New York subways. That day I went and stole two cans of red and two cans of white spray paint, went back to my school, sat there and waited for it to be dusk. I jumped the fucking fence and did a piece. It was the worst piece you ever saw in your life.

But the next day, all these kids were just looking at it. Hundreds of kids. So I kept doing it. 40 years later I’m still doing it. My life changed then because instead of getting up for surfing at 5am, I was just getting home at 5am, from painting all night. It was a transition.

Then I started getting into the roots of graffiti. I learned about hip hop. The hip hop world on the West Coast was weird because it had punk rock kids into it. It was the melting and the merging of the worlds. Fast for- ward to running away and living in Venice on people’s couches and getting introduced to Suicidal Tendencies and that whole lifestyle, the punk rock and the beach thing. The perfect storm of California culture. That was my life.

How do you work your color filled murals? It’s a great process.
It’s layers. It’s fucking layers and layers and layers. Every building is different, every surface is different. And you have to adapt to it — they all change. I spend a lot of time in the place before I paint it and look at photos or the surroundings and get my color palette. I think I’ve been most successful with that in Miami, it just works so well there. That’s the place I experimented with it the first time. When I went there, it was not fucking well received. They were like, “get the fuck out of here.” Somebody killed somebody under the lift while I was on it. But by the time I left, all these homeless people had cleaned up the area and they thanked me for making their place beautiful. They were singing and happy. So I was like, “good fucking work”, a color-filled painting evoking emotional color, that was the mission.

Those murals derived from my experience in London painting for the Olympic [Games] with Ron English and Shepard Fairey. I got there late, and they were all in the bar. Everyone was asking me what I was going to do. I didn’t know, I told them I was going to write my name. And Ron English tells me, “I don’t know, we love Risk. We’d love to see Risk. I can look at Risk all day long. But like, you’re here, you have a platform, you have a voice, you should probably say something.”

I was so pissed. I wanted to punch him in the face, like “fuck this dude.” But I started thinking about it. I’m traveling around the world painting, I support my kids with this. I guess I have to take this seriously. Let me think about what makes me tick and makes me most happy, dissect my art and figure out a meaning. I thought about what made me the happiest. And it was the next day driving down the freeway, looking at the illegal piece I did that night. You get so pumped by that big splash of color the first time you see it in the day- light. And then you realize, sometimes you can’t read that shit. Then you realize 90% of people on the free- way definitely can’t read it but they’re all still getting excited. So I started thinking about evoking the same emotion only without letters or characters. That’s how this whole process started.

At first, I painted the back of my house like that and it was really cool. It got me thinking what the architectural lines represent. Circles are the most rudimentary form of graffiti to me. The dot bubble fill in or the cloud background. And then the horizontal and vertical lines are weights and balances of fonts. So that’s my graffiti. People are always wondering why I “didn’t put graffiti on it”—it’s right there. That’s my graffiti right there. Those rudimentary lines? That’s deconstructed graffiti. I just love doing them.