Add Category
Updated
After this year's Adelaide Fringe festival ends next month, one of its art highlights will not be going anywhere.
Internationally renowned street artist James Cochran, aka Jimmy C, has been back in his former home town to leave his mark, collaborating with another artist, Seb Humphreys, in Adelaide's laneways on a project known as Street Art Explosion.
"Every time I come back to Adelaide I see a further transformation and more colour on the walls, new architecture," Cochran said.
"I'm surprised at how many artworks there are popping up around the place."
Among street artworks for which Jimmy C is celebrated globally is his British mural of performer David Bowie, which became a memorial after the singer's death.
He said such attention was "surreal" and beyond what he could have imagined when he was a teenager growing up in the Adelaide Hills.
"When you're a student you don't really know how you're going to make a living out of it," he said.
Hip hop inspires aerosol artworks
It was back in the late 1980s, in a golden era for hip hop music, when at the age of 15 Cochran first picked up an aerosol can.
"The hip hop culture from America made a strong impact on us young kids," he said.
"For me it was basically the mystery of painting in the night.
"I was seeing these colourful things along the railway line and I was intrigued — who the hell is painting them?"
Cochran became a leader of the graffiti subculture movement in Adelaide of the early 1990s, and said that early on he realised it was something he wanted to do for a living.
"I went to art school and it was from there that it gradually became full time," he said.
Cochran admitted there were a few times he almost got caught painting somewhere he should not have been.
"There was a time when graffiti ... was basically perceived as vandalism and nothing else," he said.
"It's all to do with rebellion, it's to do with finding identity."
Attitudes to urban art changing
Cochran said his rebellious streak initially drew him to the art form.
"Rebelling was part of it, that was part of my nature, also finding an identity on the street among friends," he said.
"It gave me a lot of things, one of them was an outlet of expression, so if there was any adolescent angst, frustration, it was a very good way to express yourself and have a focus.
"My work is often about how we connect to the world around us — maybe at an atomic level or through energy."
The South Australian-born artist said attitudes toward urban art were slowly changing.
"I've met police, security guards that were 10 years ago chasing graffiti artists and now they're buying canvases of graffiti or street art books for their coffee table," he said.
"It's definitely evolved and matured as an art form. Even though it still has the rawness and the rebellious aspect of it, it has also become very sophisticated and institutionalised.
"Street art is appearing in museums now and [is] collected by major art collectors around the world."
Topics: visual-art, contemporary-art, street-art, community-and-multicultural-festivals, carnivals-and-festivals, events, arts-and-entertainment, community-and-society, adelaide-5000, sa
First posted