
Mike Giant’s career is the result of genuine curiosity and decades of drawing for five hours a day. He’s been—and remains—a world-class graffiti writer, tattooist and illustrator with his REBEL8 line. He’s made zines, skateboard designs, animations, prints, collages and stacks of interesting artist and company collaborations. He travels all over the world, rides his bikes, practices mindfulness, smokes a gang of weed, and is a fully tattooed goofball that one can bring to dinner parties.
Whether a page drawn in a friend’s black book amid collected signatures of other graffiti writers, or the large-scale works he hangs in galleries, Mike Giant’s drawings will fool you, even up close. The cleanliness, razor edges and solid blacks of the images all come from a Sharpie and Mike’s surgeon-steady hand, but look like they were printed. “In some ways, I took a lot of pride in that,” Mike explains. “As the graphic world has become more fixated on vector graphics, I think I wanted to show that I could replicate the same results by hand, thereby usurping the notion that computers are somehow ‘better,’ which I think is bullshit.”
That ability to make flawless solids and lines is a special one, and it separates Mike from the pack, but in art as in life, we can get stuck in the forms that liberate us. “This year, I started to feel like the original drawings were feeling really stale and impersonal when hanging in a gallery… I felt like the time had come to infuse more of my hand, heart and mind in my drawings.” In the summer of 2008, Mike lived on a houseboat in an Amsterdam canal. “Over the course of my summer in Amsterdam, I started to think about ways to make my original drawings more personal. I began by making notations about moment-to-moment things in the white areas around the inked illustrations: things relating to the music playing in the room, or the kind of marijuana I was smoking, or just the random thoughts that I notice when practicing mindfulness meditation. Then I started writing out explanations of the symbols I like to use, outlines of movie ideas, food fantasies, etc.”
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