The Kukuxumusu graffiti drawer writes out the Fiesta
To write out the fiestas in graffiti form. That is what we most want to do this coming year in Sanfermin. And, as we have had a graffiti freak in among our other sketchers and drawers here at Kukuxumusu for the last couple of years (just check out how he left the front wall of one of our stores last year…), it was put to him that he might like to write out some graffiti on the walls of one of our T-shirts, giving his own personal view of how to live and enjoy the fiesta scene.
So Jedis, as this artist likes to call himself in his other life, got out his special paint-sprayed sneakers and put on his special work outfit and soon went off in search of inspiration out among the peeled and stripped walls that line the deserted warehouses and dirty alleys of the industrial sites.
So just how would this freaky graffiti artist conceive the fiesta and all the wild partying, the surge of adrenalin and generally “painting the town red? Well, it must be said he managed to surprise us with a labyrinth-like graffiti, one of those impossible features where you can lose yourself and go astray among all kinds of far-out things.
Perhaps some of you do not know that the word graffiti comes from the Greek word “graphein”, which, in fact, means to write. So, in fact, the graffiti guys are actually street writers who are continuing a tradition that goes back to ancient times. In ancient Rome, in Pompey, in the catacombs and in the ancient graveyards there was lots of graffiti writing going on.
Well, of course, our friend Jedis does not give a damn about the history of graffiti. Nor does he take the trouble to tell us what the hell he has been trying to write out in this graffiti-fiesta T-shirt mural. What he really likes doing is just getting out there and spending all day and all night with his sprays and his mates as they assault prohibited walls and forbidden areas, in a dark and clandestine way.
Little Talking, Much Drawing
When he clocks into The Drawing Factory each morning, he almost always appears with a sleepy face and invariably wearing a dark sunshade and with a pair of headphones wrapped round his head as he listens to his eclectic and bizarre music for hours, until finally his stomach starts rattling and he thinks of food.
So Jedis does not speak too often; he just draws a lot and he also manages to surprise us by wearing different sneakers every day. He has never been seen in a pair of shoes, black in his favorite color and he sometimes puts on a tracksuit top that looks like something straight out of the eighties’ that he has probably nicked from his grandfather’s wardrobe.
We have transformed Jedis’s concept of the ‘grafiesta’ and put it on a T-shirt which could be just the thing to wear moving from fiestas to fiestas throughout the summer, from concert to concert and from festival to festival. It comes in a dark black, all the better to resist the hangovers. It is made in a super-soft 100% cotton and it makes you look cool, even when you are feeling all in bits inside.
This year, if you hit Pamplona for Sanfermin – surely one of those places that is a must-do at least once in your life – you will very likely meet up with more than one freaked-out guy dressed up in this T-shirt. You will see them from a mile away, because, as you well know, it is mandatory to wear red and white in Sanfermin fiestas and so, obviously, black will stand out a mile. And I guess, if you are still in here reading all this, it is very likely you are already wearing one of these T-shirts too!
May the Fiesta be with you!
