In Australia in the 80's, graffiti was in it's energy filled infancy and nobody knew the power of Graffiti to come.

Being an Island that some local polititions labeled, "The Ass end of the world" meant that it would take quite a while before the influences of world graffiti would take hold. That didn't worry the Australian Graffiti community as they already knew they were on to something big.

At this time most Aussie writers also believed 2 things, New York was the Epicentre of Graffiti and that Aussies had a style of their own.

The latter become extremly accurate through the late 80's to mid 90's with style masters battling it out to re-invent the graffiti wheel. Friendly rivalry saw each state band together to represent their style with as much zest as they could muster.

In amongst this active time, a handful of writers stepped up to the plate to be truely unique and take their styles to new and interesting levels. One such writer is Caibs from the Sydney born Kick Off Crew.(KOC). He was taking his letters to a whole new level and influencing a generation of writers in the process.

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We managed to get a few words from the source:
Having been schooled at the end of the 1980s by one of Sydney's original BBoys and Writers, Sevn, I gained a firm appreciation for (amongst other things) original (letter) style!

They say necessity is the mother of invention - for Piet Mondrian, the early 20th century Abstractionist, it was a belief that art and architecture would eventually evolve into a single (art)form, his own paintings evolving into black lines separating primary colors on a white board remain a strong inspiration for my own work. Of course this is simplifying his achievements in art and art theory somewhat, but for myself, it was something that made perfect sense. Back in the early/mid 1990s I didn't have a great deal of resources and would often use small test pots of acrylic paint to fill larger areas and only a few cheap cans to finish. At the time, this was considered to be a fairly abstract form Graffiti, but for myself it was a necessary form digression / evolution.

By the mid 1990s, I found that by doing the final outline first and covering up/ filling in areas that needed a bit more attention and/or detail, I could be chased off at anytime with what could be passed off as the finished piece, albeit abstract, whilst my painting partners may have no outline complete, half a keyline (second line) or unfinished fill and a rough sketch left behind...

Overtime I feel I have refined this process to a point where the less paint I use before considering a painting finished, the more satisfied and content I am with the result.