Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1. SOFLES: Layers

BSA Special Feature: SOFLES: Layers

Without the pomposity and subtle class-conscious signaling that those Youtube ads for MasterClass use to coat their appeal with, here is Australia’s master of myriad graffiti styles, SOFLES, giving you the inside look at tools and techniques for his craft with confidence and flair.  

Yes, he’s spraying and showing you the right caps to use, but if this hadn’t been abundantly clear before, this discipline is as much about choreography and parry and thrust as it is anything involving paint and hue. Here are the details, the product of knowledge and history, his 10,000 hours.

Technology has enabled the ease of this conveyance of knowledge in a way that early graffiti writers couldn’t have dreamed, and the classroom here is amply captured and framed for you by director/editor/artist/instructor Colin Mckinnon (@profetsone), but it is also the mindset of a generation so far removed from graffiti’s roots that enables SOFLES to instruct us this way as well as his personal character.

Generous in his instinct to share with you, SOFLES gives all to his gesture, his handstyling, his tracing of contour, his building of volume, application of dimension and texture, his sweep, his footwork. Did he just perform a pirouette?