It turns out that Edwin Emanuel still hasn’t watched the Telugu movie Orange and has no intentions of doing so either. The connection being, Edwin, also happens to be a self-taught graffiti artist like the lead actor in the movie. “Everyone tells me to watch it, but I am not interested. I have been doing this since I was a teenager, it is only now that I have taken it up professionally.” Edwin in fact is a full time photographer working with his father. Asked to choose between photography and graffiti, Edwin avers, “it is like asking me to choose between my passion and hobby.”
Edwin acknowledges to have done drawing and painting in school but at that time he didn’t know he would be doing something like graffiti art on people’s walls for décor. As an artist he thinks graffiti is a very personal art and can be only a component of one’s interiors. Too much of graffiti, he says, “spoils the look of the place unless it is an open space like that of the interiors of a restaurant.” The theme of the art too depends on the taste of the person or the character of the place.
Right now the parking area at Edwin’s apartment has two big graffiti set to get his final touch. Elsewhere, Edwin was commissioned to do a 60 ft long wall in an engineering college. “The theme was the annual college celebrations. So it was easy for me to play with colours and abstract designs. The other advantage was a completely open space he was given; any amount of colour wouldn’t harm the place,” explains Edwin. His other fun project was the interiors of a restaurant with the theme fulltoo Hyderabadi’. Sights and scenes around the city and the character of the city as one sees for real figure in that,” he adds.
This art he says, shouldn’t be done out of impulse as it is not very cheap and is permanent unless it is covered by fresh paint. This is the reason when requests come in, “I usually make a small print and ask them to think over it before I begin the riot of colours,” he laughs. At the moment Edwin is working on a Superman theme for a client’s interiors and making sure the die-hard Superman fan is thrilled to bits once it is done.
His advice to novice graffiti artists: “Don’t abuse the art by randomly writing on street walls.”
