PAINTSHOP STUDIO, founded in 2007, is made up of Rick Walker and Sandra Ramos, with the former on the creative side - 'the fun stuff... and the dirty work,' Walker jokes - with Ramos using her background in advertising and client services to make the rest of the business work. Its style is informed by graffiti, which has interested Walker since childhood. As a 'kid of the 1980s,' he says, 'I wasn't very good at djing, or breakdancing... but I was quite good at painting, so I just got into the visual arts side of the hip-hop movement, and then carried on really.'Although graffiti was Walker's first love, given there wasn't much in the way of paid graffiti work at the time he decided to train as a graphic designer. It was his experience in that industry that inspired the formation of Paintshop Studio - though partly it was reaction against it. 'It was kind of a response to over-polished, over-communicated messages,' says Walker. The stark contrast with graffiti presented an opportunity: 'I was painting a lot on the streets and finding I was getting a better response from doing a painting on a street where I was designing a billboard...'So it made me think... people respond much more to hand-painted, handcrafted art, and that there was quite an interesting market there. So, I was able to bring my two passions of design and graffiti together.'Over a decade on, Paintshop has established a body of work that aims to keep the energy of graffiti, but to mix it with the discipline of design. Within its arsenal of tools are hand painting, typography and signwriting (collaborating with a growing community of signwriters), applied to large-scale murals or wayfinding for interiors with equal success.
展开▼
