SN 103

As you can observe  the tag that I use is Son103, I have used some other names in the past. The 103 is inspired by the new york founders who all used their street number, my number  has another meaning. Many years ago I bought my first motorised bicycle and it was a peugeot 103. It offered me more opportunities to bomb swift at isol8ed places without getting caught thus inspiring to use this number. The beginnig for me was back in '83. I live in the east of Holland so Amsterdam was a strange far place. I started writing my tag on the walls before I'd even knew there was a new movement called Graffiti.  Before me the streets were clean and sterile, here I origin8ed it.  It was in the air in those days. Nijmegen had about 20 dedic8ed writers for a few years but the youth were seeing the marx on the walls and followed...
Years later I saw Style Wars, it was on national TV, and than it exploded. Writers, writers everywhere, and they were organising themselves in crews. I stood at the cradle of the first graffiti magazines in Holland called Freestyle, later someone contacted me for our own magazine called Bomber, and it was a direct hit. Later I assisted with the magazine TrueColorz. Meanwhile I was collecting everything rel8ed to Graffiti, pix, outlines with writers all over Europe. At first there were only a few people collecting graffiti stuff so a lot of the Old school stuff has unfortunately disappeared. There was a nationwide graffiti family forming and we were going strong. Then we discovered the subways, trains and anything that could move. All of it was bombed. The dutch railroads didn't see it coming. It was too easy for everybody in those days to bomb a moving subject.Nowadays it is much harder and the railway cops are also getting a little bit smarter.

These days I discovered the computer. Graffiti still is very important to me, I still draw a lot figuring out new angles. But painting doesn't happen a lot anymore. Sure, nothing can beat the feeling of cre8ing a piece of art on a wall, provoking society, showing people what graffiti is all about. Meanwhile the Justice department is trying to shut the total graffiti movement. Writers become a prey. Almost everybody (if not all) has encountered the cops. Luckily the penalties are not that heavy. Although those causing the most damage are punished the hardest. Now I can use the computer to collect all pix. The family is becoming global. Sure, not all graffiti writers have Internet, but more and more are finding their way here.

Graffiti is for me an artform in which the youth can express their feelings on the walls. To cre8 an artpiece of your own using your own set of rules. Provoking society because they do not try to understand the motiv8ion of the artists. Graffiti is not and will never be respected as it should be. The medium of the spraycan is still ignored by the artschools. It is liquid paint but more versitile. Even todays "artists" refuse to use the spraycan. But why? It can only broaden their artistic horizon! There are hundreds of different styles in the graffiti scene. No one can totally claim a style to be his own. Everybody is influenced by others. It is no shame to bite. Just camouflage it with your own influences. Everybody has got to start somewhere. I also cre8ed my own style but the othershave always considered it as too weird, but that is what it is all about, originality, dare to cross borders set by others, adopt adapt improve....SON103 

Deepest respect and admir8ion: