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George Beleveslis aka WAKE is an active street artist with numerous paintings both in Greece and abroad. Passionate about graffiti he has also collaborated with other artists, bringing some color and emotion in grey city walls! Today he unravels his thoughts on urban art and talks about his creative explorations! Let’s welcome him :)
 
Hello George and welcome to EC! When did you start actively doing street art? Do you remember your first wall painting?

Thessaloniki, 1997. I was in the car with my dad driving to Kalamaria, when I suddenly caught a glimpse of a huge “Wall of Fame” under a bridge. For months, every time we passed by, I knew I only had just a few seconds available to see the painted walls through the window as we passed by. Not having a photo camera, I decided to walk to this place and document these alien things by hand drawing everything in my school sketchbook. For days and days, I was trying to understand and conceive all these arrows, stretched  geometries  and English words.

I hadn’t realized that a word is actually the nickname of a unique person (tag) and I considered graffiti as a random  multiplication of words, symbols and colorful patterns. Who? When? Why? How? Well, curiosity killed the cat!

Books and older friends cleared things out for me. In the end, this lead to my first wall painting, a bad copy of a wildstyle ('joser'). I remember the strong smell of the spraycan paint, my dirty clothes, the dumbed wall, the joy of vandalism and that incomparable feeling after I had finished. The world has never been the same after that. I was infected. I was a graffiti writer.
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