Penelope Mitchell Quotes

The art that I do is for the people. It is about engaging a new audience who wouldn't necessarily go to art galleries and museums and painting on the street is the best way to do that.

The best art is on the street.

I don't have this obsessive need to do street art all the time because it's already opened doors for me.

When you walk down the street and see something in a crazy spot, there's something powerful about that. The street will always be an important part of getting art out there for me.

I consider myself a multi-platform artist - not just a street artist - but the audience I found through street art has created many of the opportunities I now have on other platforms.

Street artists want to add something to the environment. They consider the audience, whereas graffiti writers don't care about anyone except themselves, they do it purely for the kick.

My work isn't overtly political, although it is sometimes painted in places where I don't have permission to paint, so that could be construed as a political statement.

When I got into graffiti, it was the most-exciting art form and it changed the course of my life.

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they're having a piss.

I started off as a graffiti artist in the South Bronx. My tag name was 'Loco' because I would go crazy and tag anywhere I wanted, in the weirdest places.

Street artists need to get back to actually doing things on the streets instead of in the galleries where they all seem to be ending up. I hope this term 'street artist' falls from the face of the earth, in my honest opinion.

I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world.

The city's the best gallery I could imagine. I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. I would control it directly with the public in the streets.

Graffiti is linear, and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls.

The thing with sculpture is, 90% of the time, when I pass a piece of sculpture, it's in public or somewhere, and it's just, how inconvenient that that's there. It takes up so much room, and it's so oppressive.

I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.

I want people to get inspired by public space - their space. People tend to forget about it because they do the daily thing, but putting up these sculptures breaks the routine.

The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still - it's not something that a museum would really embrace.

The Internet doesn't always play a great role for art, especially art in the street, as people take what they see for the final image of it. But the most interesting thing about street art is to see it for real, to understand what it means and where it's displayed.

I think the art fair is very much a form of urbanism. I think something really happens to the cities when such a fair happens. The city becomes an exhibition; it's amazing.

I'm a painter. I was a graffiti artist, and I painted all over the world.

In 2009, I began creating 'Waterworks' with the new vernacular coming from the 'Signs of Life' work in Las Vegas.

I'd been doing projects outdoors for the public. I made pigeons eat geometry by putting bread out in rhomboids and triangles. I don't know if this activity made sense, but the work was available.

I wasn't trying to turn graffiti into an art form. I just wanted to learn about art. I wanted to learn this game.

I suppose illustration tends to live in the streets, rather than in the hermetically sealed atmosphere of the museum, and consequently it has come to be taken less seriously.