Ben Eine Quotes
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You just have to be clever about who you work with. Had I done Gap or H&M, there's no way Louis Vuitton would have wanted to work with me. So you hold out for the big ones.
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It's hard to live just by selling paintings.
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In certain places around the world, street art is widely accepted and it is part of the urban environment.
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The whole world is covered in graffiti. No one cares. It's just part of urban noise.
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My friends were stealing cars and shoplifting. I was never into that but I was cheeky. I enjoyed making people laugh.
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Anyone can lose their home and find their life is turned upside down.
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I respect Virgin Atlantic's brave and challenging attitude and the way it goes against the grain, so I jumped at the chance to be part of the first ever Gallery in the Air.
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For me, it's mostly about having stuff on the street. You're walking down the street, you do it every day, and suddenly there's something that wasn't there yesterday: something bright and cheerful and different. It might stay there for a year; maybe it will disappear.
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I'm not a massive artist by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, I've been in papers and magazines, but you never have any idea if anyone actually reads it or pays any attention.
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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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I got a message from Downing Street that my picture's hanging in the White House. Which is weird.
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When I can, I enjoy working with local people to involve everyone in the community in changing their environment.
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I did long-term re-insurance claims. Asbestos, health hazards, pollution. It was very boring. But I've got quite a mathematical brain and it paid well.
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I remember finding this book, which showed a New York subway train that had been covered in so much graffiti you couldn't recognise it was a train. I thought, ‘I want to do that… how do you do that?'
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You can't be a punk all your life.
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My philosophy through all my work, be it on canvas or on the street, is about pushing boundaries and not going with the flow because everyone else is doing something a certain way.
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Graffiti writers will never stop. They'll just evolve. It's interesting what ideas people come up with and how it all extends forward.
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I'm a luxury brand.
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Whenever I go anywhere in the world to do a show I try to paint something in the street as well.
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When I first got into graffiti I thought it was going to change the world. But when, 20-years-later, it still hadn't, I got bored of the self-imposed rules.
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It makes me really proud to be able to use my art to spread positive messages around the world.
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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.
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An airplane cabin isn't the first place people think of when they choose an exhibition space, but I'm all for doing things differently.
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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.