1) Alright so thanks for taking the time out to do this interview, can you give us a brief introduction of how you got to this point? When did you start, what crew do you rep (if any), and what’s the story behind “Coaster colorz”?

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Hello, my name is Coaster and I´m from Rostock Germany. I started writing at the age of 14 it was in the year 2000. At the age of 12, I started Breakdancing in a youth club. This was my first contact with the Hip Hop Movement and the 4 Elements. Breakdance was my life, but graffiti fascinated me more and more. So I did some sketches and tags from time to time.

In 2003 I met Sner from the CSR CREW at a festival. We already knew each other from the Youth club, but we weren´t close friends till that Festival. We had a fun time, on the last day he offered me to become a member of his Crew. And I said… Fuck Yeah! He became a mentor to me and from that moment I seriously started writing, before That I only did sketches on paper. I also met other members of the crew and we became close friends quickly. We hung out every day, doing sketches, smoking weed, going out bombing walls and trains. Graffiti became my life.

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2) I see you offer a variety of different services and products, which I think is really cool. Not enough graffiti artists capitalize on their abilities so I’m curious how did you get your business started? Can you tell us about your clothing brand and how it connects with your graffiti services?

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From 2004-2007 I was in school to become an “Offset Printer”. At this time I printed my first Shirt with graffiti on it as a birthday present to myself. I did a sketch, scan it, print it on a low budget Shirt foil, cut it out with scissors and put it on the shirt with an Iron. And I also did my first Graffiti job. So I saw that there is a market for Graffiti Art.
In 2007 after I was done school, my boss told me he couldn’t keep me on anymore, So I took a year off to figure out what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. Working for a company 45 years as a slave for the system!? No way! I want to do my own thing without someone telling me what to do. So I decided to start my own business Graffiti Shirts and painting Walls. In 2009 I founded “Coaster Clothing”.

3) What is your favorite documentary or book that covers the history of major players of graffiti and why?

My favorite Movie is “Beatstreet”, cause it was the first movie I saw about the roots of the Hip Hop movement. “Wildstyle” is also a great documentary about the beginning of Graffiti. “Subway Art” from Martha Cooper is also a must-have.

4) in most entrepreneurs they are 100% business-minded but what makes your business unique is that the value you make is made straight from your imagination. The value you are offering to other people couldn’t be taken from anyone else and isn’t like any other product out there, people are instead licensing your imagination which is your connection to the infinite in my opinion. I’m curious what your thoughts are on the artist/ businessman relationship you have to have with yourself to run a business? Do you find it difficult to balance between the two? I’ve heard people say it’s like having two people in your head at the same time.

2009 I also started working in a copy shop that a friend of mine owns. For me, the most important thing was, be able to pay my bills, Because at the beginning my network wasn’t big enough to gain the income to live on. In the Copy Shop, I learned how to vectorize Graffiti Styles in Adobe Illustrator to make them printable and also about the different Print variations.

5) with your art expanding from murals to digital to products, I assume you had some formal training. What is your background in art, did you go to school or are you self taught?

I never attended an art school or anything like that. It was all learning by doing it a little bit with some help from time to time. Step by step I met new people and my network got bigger and bigger. One job came, and then another and today, with the copy shop, graffiti, and shirt printing I gain a regular income. I’m not rich, but I have a good life and the most important thing is, I can do what I love… So work doesn’t suck….that much.

7) Do you make a living off of your work now and if not do you plans to transition out of a day job? If you do do you think it’s the dream? What is the reality of making money doing this type of work that people do not realize? Do you have free time or does work take up all the time?

Over the years it was necessary to be a businessman, but I don’t like to call myself one. It´s like 70% artist and 30% businessman. Sometimes there are Graffiti or Print jobs you don’t like to do but you have to because of the money. So sometimes there is a conflict between both components. Work and Family take most of my time, but I try to do at least one or two pieces a month.

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8) for those that are wanting to start their own business doing what you do, what advice do you have on getting started?

If you want to start your own business, a big network is very important. Also, you need luck and endurance. Always be honest and reliable.

6) What kind of music do you listen to when you paint? Who is your favorite hip hop artist and why?

It depends on my mood. Sometimes I listen to Radiohead or Björk, sometimes Pearl Jam or Nirvana or Techno or House…. My Favorite Hip Hop artist is Jeru the Damaja, I like his beats and what he is rapping about.

9) when you were coming up who inspired you and taught you the ropes and who inspires you now? Who are the artists that are inspiring you now?

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When I was coming up sner and mora are the ones who gave me most of my knowledge. I was inspired by my crew members and also by well-known writers like Daim, Dare, Loomit, Won and so on… Today there is no specific writer who inspires me… There are so many good Writers with different styles. I get inspired by all of them in one way or another…

10) Any shout outs you would like to give? where can people follow you?

Peace out to Sner, Modus, Mora, Nice, Ekel, OH, Sera, Crek, Rism
Thanks to Bombing Science for reaching out.

To see more from Coaster Colorz, check out his Instagram.
And to see more Graffiti Interviews, Click here.

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The area around Lake Street and Hiawatha has changed greatly in the past 50 years, but the train yards in Longfellow that run parallel to Hiawatha, past the towering Archers-Daniel-Midland silos, look very much as they must have 75 years ago. Walking around the yards on a recent Sunday afternoon, alone except for a friend accompanying me, I had a feeling of being completely out of time.

Trains have been pulling in and out of these yards for more than a hundred years, carrying wheat, fuel, and anything else that needed to be transported between Chicago, Canada and the West Coast. They look very much the same now as they must have then, and it’s not hard to start making wild mental calculations about how difficult it might be for you to jump onto one of those boxcars undetected, and how long it would be before you were in California.

Riding the rails strikes some deep nerve in the shared American cultural experience; it’s not entirely inaccurate to note that the modern ideal of the teenager as a roaming, independence-minded outcast was largely created during the Great Depression boxcar boom. All those boxcar kids with dirty clothes and bindles riding the rails helped do a lot of mythmaking. There is still an active, vibrant subculture of train-hoppers, making their way back and forth across America.

The most obvious physical evidence of this culture is train graffiti. Take the Northstar commuter rail past the massive Burlington-Northern-Santa Fe rail yards between Minneapolis and Coon Rapids, or poke around in the rail yards in Longfellow or Northeast, and you’ll come across hundreds upon hundreds of examples. Colorful, larger-than-life train graffiti can be found on nearly every car.

(Of course, MinnPost’s readers being uniformly upstanding, law-abiding citizens, I should not have to mention here that the many, many illegal activities recounted in this piece — graffiti, train-hopping, wandering around rail yards — do not represent the views of this fine organization.)

This type of graffiti has a long, strange, and thoroughly American lineage. The first markings to appear on boxcars were made with chalk and pencil by railroad workers, noting arrival and departure times, weights, and other information about the car’s contents for the benefit of their colleagues in distant cities that would be unloading them. As Woody Guthrie-style rail riding became a popular, illicit way for people to travel cheaply across long distances in the early part of the 20^th century, a whole taxonomy of hobo markings began to appear on the sides of these boxcars – like the railroad workers’ markings, these were cryptic notations meant for a specific, in-the-know audience. (In 2010, the Walker Art Center screened Bill Daniels’ film “Who is Bozo Texino?”— one of the best examinations of this phenomenon and required viewing for anyone interested in this history.)

Decades later, in 1970s-era New York City, kids in the Bronx associated with the nascent hip-hop subculture began spray-painting the sides of subway cars, turning the city’s transit system into a rolling museum of outsider art (covered from both the pro- and anti-graffiti perspectives in the great 1983 film “Style Wars”).

Over the last 30 years, these disparate styles – intimate, rural hobo markings and bold, colorful urban spray-painted vistas – have fused into a contemporary style that seems to draw equally from each tradition. The sides of train cars today run the gamut, from sloppy gang-style tags and idle signatures to line drawings, stenciled imagery, and enormously complex color fields. These markings are meant to be examined in close quarters, or viewed from long distances. They are both widely accessible to anyone who might happen see a train roll by, and completely impenetrable to anyone not knowledgeable of the subculture.

One can find boasts, hastily scribbled epigrams, social commentary, threats, jokes, names, notations of date and location, and formal displays of lettering proficiency. It’s an endlessly evolving conversation, with work commenting on other work nearby, brighter letters written atop faded letters, and with callbacks to other artists. It’s difficult to know how much of the work originates here, and how much was created in distant cities and is simply passing through Minneapolis on its way elsewhere, seen already by viewers hundreds of miles away. It’s hard to know when the work was created – years ago, months ago, days ago? It’s a jumble of symbolism, styles, and intentions that feels like it’s both completely ephemeral and like it’s drawing on an old tradition. It seems to spring from a secret history that’s never been completely recorded and probably never will be.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

It’s a very complex feeling. It’s hard to see the work and not admire the bravado and technical skill, and also feel bad for the railroader workers who have to powerwash it all off so the car’s official markings are legible.

I can’t pretend to have any great knowledge of the names spray-painted and marked on the sides of the boxcars I photographed in Longfellow. As in any subculture, the artists here undoubtedly have hundreds of admirers who know the intimate details of their work, even as the artists remain invisible to the mass culture. But you don’t have to know the biographic details to appreciate the handles – Sluto, Agono, Bum Nixon, Franco, Maple Spring, Wooden Axle, the Graf Hick Krew, and a “Conrail Twitty,” whose death is memorialized in one poignant graffito. These names wittily evoke the last 75 years of American subculture, drawing a fairly direct line from hobos to hip-hop.

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A few of the pieces I see are worth pointing out. The most striking work is on two cars by an artist whose handle I didn’t see. One reads “TAX THE RICH,” and the other, simply “POVERTY” (there are two additional smaller notations on this last one: “$$ for war / But no more for the poor”). They’re bold pieces, meant to be seen from a distance and with political implications easily grasped by the viewer. I notice the artist left the train’s identification number clear in both pieces. I wonder if there’s a code among these artists to leave critical information uncovered, or if this has been removed after the fact. Up close, one can see in the slashes of the spray paint that the lettering was executed quite rapidly, but from a distance it looks seamless. It’s the populist economic philosophy of our time, as surely as it was the populist economic philosophy of the Great Depression. The continuity is striking.

Not all the work is topical (or as accomplished). Most of it is best described as offhand, lightly surreal non-sequiters. Sluto draws an outline of the state, with this rationale for living here: “Shitty football team, shitty climate, cold hands, cold feet. Must be the girls?” Agono whines (or threatens?), “Love I don’t get none, that’s why I’m so hostile to the kids that get some.” Visceral makes the mysterious, quasi-Oedipal assertion that “my mom is the prettiest lady of all time,” alongside a crude sketch of the pretty mom in question, smiling pleasantly.

Like any collection of artwork, it’s all over the map (literally, in this case). Some of it is dumb, some is very poignant and even touching. Some is terribly ugly or lazy, and some is wildly ambitious and imaginative. Taken as a whole, it depicts the mass consciousness of a fluid subculture moving endlessly within a sprawling nation of far-flung borders. It’s a subculture that can seem both crass and possessing a highly refined aesthetic. It seems always on the move, and always looking to catch the next train out of town.

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