Wednesday, 25 December 2013

Artist Profile: Ekons

Ekons hails from Cape Town, South Africa and has been consistant throughout the last 10 years ( and the rest) in contributing some great graffiti art and design to this culture. Originally part of Cape Town's YMB crew he now paints with 40hk, a collective of like minded artists who are out there slugging paint on blank surfaces worldwide.
We had a quick chat with him whilst he dropped a piece in Notre Dame.
 what inspires you?

Anything and everything creative. This can be music, cartoons, low brow art and fine art, bad graffiti, good graffiti, graphic design, exhibitions, books, magazines etc. I try to surround myself with things that help me to spark new and interesting ideas.
 

Have you studied art or design?

I did art all the way through school and am currently studying visual communication (graphic design) and aim to get a degree out of it. But for the last 30 odd years Ive been self taught.
 

 How do you approach creating a concept? Examples?

With every concept you should try to create something new and interesting, if it can be beautiful - even better. So with this in mind new concepts generally come from the idea of merging a few ideas together.

As an example I’ll talk about a font I designed called “Astrotip”. The idea came from having really nice and simple letters and merging them with fat cap style graffiti flares, as this plays on the fact that I have been a writer for the last 16 years and enjoying playing with letters and styles. I felt I had not seen this before and therefore could present something new and original to the world.
 

What clients have you worked for?

Graffiti: New Balance, Puma, Edgars clothing retail, 8ta cellular network, Paramount Pictures, Engen Petrol, A wide range of festivals, Truworths clothing, Flexfit caps..

Design:Red Bull, Mountain Dew, Olmeca Tequila, Hellocomputer design agency, Coca Cola, DJ Jakob Snake, Shelflife street store, Puma, Nike.
 

 What are you looking to do in the future? 

One day I’d like to work for myself and to have a lot of side projects on the go. The ultimate is finding a balance between actual corporate design work and personal work, and hopefully having more paid personal work than corporate.
 Some early Econ action
 Econ, Mace in Retreat






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