Ben Eine Quotes
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All too often, when people think about art in the U.K., they think London. There's some really great work being produced outside of the capital city and I think it is important to stop and acknowledge that.
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Whenever I get a job that's somewhere around America, I fly over my ex-wife and daughter and hang out with them.
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Street art belongs on the street. But I'm a working street artist and I earn my money selling art in the style of street art via galleries.
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I don't get paid for what I do in public places. So I invest the money I earn in galleries back into doing the stuff I passionately want to do on the street.
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Old typography or letter woodblocks that are hand-carved, cracked, and worn are especially beautiful. I love that aged, handmade effect, and that's why I don't muck around much with Photoshop.
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A lot of my paintings have quite negative meanings, but painted in a bright and cheerful way.
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I'm hoping that Abu Dhabi's first piece of street art will inspire the next generation of artists the same way that the discovery of subway art inspired me all those years ago.
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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.
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Spraypainting a shop shutter turns an ugly, boring thing into something interesting and colourful. I think you'd have to be a pretty negative person to find fault in it.
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I love the process of cutting everything out with a scalpel yourself: I don't want to have my stencils drawn up in Illustrator, then laser-cut. I like the fact that it's slightly wrong; I think it gives it a beauty. The individual and handmade will always be worth more than what a computer can do, at least until computers can learn how to make mistakes.
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I've a lot of respect for what people are doing here in Manchester, to promote the city's creativity and Aviva Investors Manchester Art Fair has played a big role in that. I'm glad to bring my work to the North West.
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Street art, unlike graffiti, adds to the environment and is a positive experience for the artist and community.
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I used to run away from the cops and now I stand and chat with them about my art. I'm older now and it is harder to run away from them. It would be embarrassing for an older man to get arrested by someone half your age. So I gave up running.
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Most people think I do street art, so I do everything for nothing. I'm an urchin who paints walls and does work for nothing. That's the first misconception about street artists, that we just paint for nothing.
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I'm a long way from being a Damien Hirst.
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I don't want to sell to street art collectors, I want to sell to art collectors.
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I have never voted in any election - I usually have more important things to do, especially since I've had kids.
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Banksy's a very selfish, driven, paranoid artist. For good reasons.
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The Prime Minister gave President Obama one of my artworks and suddenly my name was all over the news.
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I'm always travelling and spend a lot of time in airports so I know what it feels like to get a personal welcome home. I wish I got more of them.
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One of the advantages of not going to art school is that you're not taught what you can't do.
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I painted the words "GREAT ADVENTURE" in Beijing, Dallas, San Francisco, Copenhagen, and Japan. What it means to me is completely different to everybody else. And that's what I love about random words and phrases taken out of context: everyone applies their own context. If you want to apply something political or meaningful to a word I wrote on the side of the wall, then it's up to you.
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David Cameron has given one of my paintings to President Obama. It's quite mad, really. But it's OK. It's not the kind of recognition I seek or get every day, but Cameron seems quite a positive kind of guy and Obama's a dude. I would probably have had issues if it had been for Bush.
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It's hard to live just by selling paintings.