Just for Starters

The very first blog of the series, introducing the yet-to-be-known street artist [Bli:p].
 I live in Riga, Latvia. It’s a small, beautiful place to live and stencil in – there aren’t many stencil artists here, but I believe there is a lot of hidden talent within many people here. The one thing I love the most in this city are the hot, dry summers and the really great people – nobody seems to give a fuck about you stencilling. I’ve pasted few stencils in broad daylight in parks and fountains and people never seemed to care or even notice me. I thank you for that, my fellow citizens.

 I believe the thing that dragged me into stencilling was one of my friends. It was back at fifth grade. We used to buy these permanent ink markers and fill our school notebooks with silly little tags, that were really just shortened names. My friends used to call himself Maro, my name was Patr. That was the moment [Bli:p] was born.

 As time passed, I found myself more and more interested into tagging, I loved the idea of throw-ups,  although back then I didn’t really know what a throw-up was. I couldn’t really draw and I had no idea of the techniques of spray painting, my first can was spent on the back of my parents garage, dripping it all, leaving my hands and clothes pitch black. It was a tough, but a very interesting start for me, it was something new and never-before experienced. Then came the two things that changed the way i looked at graffiti. The first one was a computer game of graffiti. That was the way I learned the many, many ways of street art. At the time, I didn’t see stencils would change my life forever.

 Few months later, my mother, who had grew more and more suspicious over me spraying my hands black all the time, bought me my first graffiti book. It was about the stencil artist Banksy. Back then he was not so well-known as now, but the works were as simply brilliant as nowadays I believe that made me do stencils, I really loved the idea of saying funny things, while still pointing out something that really mattered in this very simple, but beautiful way. A few weeks after that I changed my name for the second time. I became Splat, a bit more experienced artist.

 Splat was a long-lasting name for me, as I lost interest in urban art for a few years. Maro had stopped doing graffiti way back for good. I had nobody to talk about it, I had no new ideas to work on. The life of Splat ended as fast as it started – there were a few ironical stencils and tags, until it finally died a very sad, temporary death.

 Splat reincarnated with the appearance of the newborn street artist I got to know few years back. We became really close friends as the interest of street art was something very unusual in the city we lived (still live) in. Sure, we had many graffiti legends, but there were no stencil pieces, no wheat pasted stuff, all we had were throw-ups done in the best way possible. He was stencilling too, by the way. I believe that pushed me to start it all over again. I had somebody to share my ideas with and many new, interesting thoughts.

 That winter I started making small, one coloured animal stencils. I still have them somewhere, I had made a whole bunch of them - two swallows, a small deer antler, a rabbit, lady GaGa etc. I had produced almost every available CD artwork of my computer into a stencil. That was the training track for me. My skills grew with each artwork I did, they became more and more complicated, when one day I got the idea of the clapperboard piece, something I’m still proud of. It took me almost a week to produce, I couldn’t really see how to make it or what thoughts I was putting in it. Once finished, I used to lie in bed at night, thinking of the work, not understanding shit of what it says, but deep inside feeling it was something good. The moment the stencil had been sprayed onto an OSB in the garden, was when [Bli:p] appeared. The name was a very tough one for me. It took me a while to actually find the right thing for me, as everything I could rely on was my inner sixth sense. I have three completely filled notebooks with names such as Teeth, Twat and many others. It was a late night epiphany, I was deadly tired, lying on the bed, twisting my mind around the many silly possibilities, when it finally came to me. Bleep back then. It was a great relief - back then I didn’t knew of the pain the visualisation of this name would cause. After three days work I decided to pronounce myself as [Bli:p], using a very simple and easy way to do it. I certainly didn’t know of the whole picture my later work would cause, when connected to the name I was making myself.

 I believe [Bli:p] is something very rebellious in it’s own right. I don’t know if it was meant like that, or was it just a subconscious trick, but the straight forward lines and the name made me a very different street artist from most of the painters in Riga. I both intentionally and unintentionally became a minimalist, pointing out problems in peoples’ lives and the society in a very clear and understandable way. After making my first stencil of the “dangers of stencilling” called “Hitler - a graffiti artist?”, I remember thinking “Damn, this got together well”. The way I wrote [Bli:p] connected with the read-only lines as well as with the messages I tried spread. It was a way of saying “I’m saying all I want to say, no government or public media can censor me”. From that moment it progressed instantly. So, many ideas I had, so many ways of expressing yourself, it actually got me really confused for a moment or two. But that passed with a new idea I had to write down, with every single spray I made. That was, that is, and that, for sure, will be fantastic. 

- [Bli:p]