N at Winschoten
“In Winschoten, the guys who really did something were only about four or five. And some people who did it occasionally or were just hanging around. At the sports hall in Winschoten there was illegal spraying at first. I remember, I came back from vacation, and then my friends said they had received an order, and so it became it became a tolerated spot behind the sports hall. Within the Netherlands that was quite a well-known spot. Winschoten had that sports hall and the little tunnel - near the train station you had such a little tunnel, that was also a toleration spot - people from all over the Netherlands came there to spray things.
There was no Internet back then. Television gave all the information. Wednesday you had the VPRO on the radio, and Sunday night you had VPRO on TV. There you had these documentary things, about hip-hop, or hardcore. Those were sort of snippets of information, you had to make do with that. In Winschoten we had then a sports hall, a tolerating place for graffiti, in the late '80s - from '88 to the early '90s. You had the ‘teen tour’, for 40 guilders you could travel. There was one group from Winschoten, they were on the teen tour, and they met someone on the train who had a photocopied sheet. They came back with back. 'Look at that!' And we would send photos and drawings back on that sheet, and it would be published. So the pictures and our work in Winschoten had wider reach at once. Freestyle was the name of that magazine.
And that's how you learned to see things. I remember I was with my grandparents, they lived in the middle of the country, we went there from Winschoten by train, then at Utrecht you had 3 or 4 pieces next to the track. That was it huh. And some tags. Then you had a couple of pieces in Groningen, a couple near Assen and a a couple in Zwolle. That was your info, you had to make do with that. Once in a while I would rent a bike in Groningen at the station. Then you cycle through the city, and you start following some tags, yes and if you were lucky you would come across a piece but if you were unlucky, then you didn't, then you had cycled around for half a day and seen nothing. And every now and then you run into people, like at the sports hall. Two guys from Amsterdam came there. From Amsterdam all the way to fucking Winschoten, to see that sports hall. I had read an article in the Dagblad van het Noorden newspaper that at the bus station in Veendam, boys from Groningen had done graffiti on it. Then I cycled that whole distance to take pictures of it. Then you put a lot of effort into it, whereas from Winschoten, that's a really long way to cycle.
I left when I was 19, to study. From then on, I really did a lot. I started traveling a lot more, and then also met a lot of other people. Utrecht, for example: that was the sports hall times 200. I developed my own style, which was also because I was expected to do something several times a week; I wanted to make, I wanted to produce, and I did that quite well. I also went abroad more then.
At one point I went to Madrid, with only a phone number. I got to an apartment, the guys’s mother then spoke no English, and I didn't speak a word of Spanish. And then we met anyway. It's all done like this, because there was no internet, no email, no mobile phone... Discovering the world, doing something: then you find like-minded people.
You are doing it all the time. Collecting paint, then you have to think about where you're going, then you have to do it, and then when you're in another city you have to sleep somewhere - so you sleep on a bench somewhere or something, then you have to see if you can take a picture, but sometimes it's already gone, then you have to see if you can still find it, then to still get a picture. I only sprayed on trains. You're pretty tired then, and you also have to sleep and study. And that repeats itself continuously. You go out several times a week on the road.
“Discover the world, do something: then you will find like-minded people”
In elementary school I started to develop a little interest in music, and really liked The Police. Then I went to Groningen with my parents and saw Pinox everywhere. He had really bombed a lot then. In one street there were more than 50 Pinox tags. And I just didn't understand what that was. I thought: is that a band or something? It must be music. And then Style Wars came on TV, in 1984/85 or something. So before that I wasn't into graffiti at all. Then Style Wars came on TV, and the penny dropped, like, aaaah yes, that's it. And I think for a lot of people of my generation, when Style Wars came on TV came on, and that book Subway Art - that was also like WOW. I really spent every day for months sitting around fluffing. Yeah, that's really cool.
Pinox also had one ... I had seen that one once from a car or something, then I had seen Style Wars - and he too I think, and that piece then had a convex ... a kind of 3D effect say, at least that's what it looked like from the car ... and if you were to see it again now it would probably be unbelievably gnarly, but then you thought 'Hey how could that be?' I must have passed it three times by car, but I also never seen it again in a photo or anything. Or it looks very different in the picture than in my memory”.
