Author: Nick Carson

In 2005, I collaborated with renowned graffiti artist Temper to produce a limited-edition 60-page book exploring his career so far.

Read more about Temper’s portfolio

Signature Sprite Can

‘I won everybody’s vote for eight weeks on the trot. Undisputed. It was obvious it had to be my work, which was very nice to know,’ grins Temper. After a phenomenal live performance at the Sprite Urban Games 2000, he was one of four artists put forward to design the sponsor’s new packaging. His work instantly hit a nerve: they wanted him, and they wanted his brand splashed all over their drinks cans. 100 million of them.

‘The success rate was unbelievable: Coca Cola were shocked,’ he recalls. ‘It was originally meant to be a UK promotion, but people got in touch from Germany and Belgium so it obviously went European. I was already well-known on street level, but from the general public’s perception this took me to a different level. I was on television, radio, magazines, and people were actually holding my tag in their hand. It raised my profile in such a massive way – untouchable, really.’

On one hand, the ‘all graffiti is vandalism’ case could only be weakened by such a high-profile commission. But by rocketing into the public consciousness Temper risked becoming a scapegoat for graf’s less popular forms. ‘Everyone was asking me, is graffiti art or crime? I had to take a lot of things on the chin.’ Luckily, he dealt with it pretty well.

‘I protected my culture, and I communicated it to the public without diluting it or overexposing it,’ he insists. ‘I was conscious throughout every interview that I never damaged illegal writers, and only talked positively about how it’s an individual thing and can inspire. A lot of people got new commissions because their local Council began to take it more seriously. I changed graffiti for the better in this country, and I know this is talked about as one of the stepping stones to what graffiti is now.’

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In 2005, I collaborated with renowned graffiti artist Temper to produce a limited-edition 60-page book exploring his career so far.

Read more about Temper’s portfolio

Popcorn Collection

For a dyslexic child struggling with words, comic books throw open a vibrant universe of storytelling where characters come to life before your eyes. ‘I wanted to pay homage to one of the greatest things in my life, which is comics. What better way to execute this than by making an image out of words? You’re flipping the script: the whole thing just made sense.’

The final piece in the jigsaw is the title: not only had most of Temper’s childhood comic strips now become film reels, but studying the multilayered texture of the canvas was not unlike looking into a box of that familiar movie snack.

‘I’ve never seen anybody paint like that; not with aerosol,’ he admits. ‘Each canvas is a reapplication of a similar stencil 18 to 20,000 times. That’s an awful lot of stencil work. But nobody ever looks at Popcorn in that way. It’s that good; it doesn’t look stencilled.’

Every cloud – however much it drenches you – glitters within, and this revolutionary style came about by chance. Asked to spray a canvas for exhibition sponsor Airwalk, Temper planned an abstract piece and began stencilling on their logo. But with his back garden serving as an impromptu studio, he became pressed for time as the light failed and the skies opened. He needed a quick solution.

‘The gutter and soffit at the back of my house just gave enough shelter for the canvas, but I was wringing wet,’ he recalls. ‘I just started reapplying the logo to create a face. And that was the application; it was like an accident on purpose. I wanted to do something good, but that saved me being there all night.’

The style evolved, and after the glowing reception for ‘Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing’ – a growling reference to his proud Wolverhampton roots, composed of thousands of Temper tags – it lent itself well to the Popcorn idea, already part of a lengthening list of proposed collections. It’s an ongoing project, and comics remain an important part of the artist’s life.

Batman is a particularly strong influence: ‘He has every bit of ammunition that he needs to combat anything that gets in his way,’ Temper tells me with a sparkle in his eye. ‘He lives in a batcave. That’s kind of like me: I lock myself up in a studio. I haven’t got my boats, I haven’t got my helicopters, but they come out in forms of style. Anything that I need to achieve, I’ve got the ammunition to do so. Temper’s the Batman to Arron Bird, if you like.’

Read other copywriting case studies

In 2005, I collaborated with renowned graffiti artist Temper to produce a limited-edition 60-page book exploring his career so far.

Read more about Temper’s portfolio

Minuteman Exhibition (2001)

As the first solo exhibition by a graffiti artist in a public gallery, the Minuteman show was a huge turning point for the culture. Housed in Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, it put Temper face to face with the Pre-Raphaelites. ‘Prior to the exhibition I didn’t know what Pre-Raphaelite was,’ he confesses. ‘When I went into the space that I’d be exhibiting in – I’d never been in an art gallery before – one of the guys gave me a crash course.’

‘They were beautiful oil paintings, but kind of elitist: when you look at their work it’s so easy to feel insecure. But he told me the Pre-Raphaelites used to do a lot of drugs, were into wife swapping. That took away my insecurity in a way,’ Temper smiles. The work of Birmingham-born Edward Burne-Jones caught his eye, in particular ‘The Depths of the Sea’ – a mermaid clutching a sailor, at first glance attempting a rescue but actually gripping him beneath the waves to drown him.

‘Some parts of the establishment didn’t want to give space to this thing called graffiti, so in true Temper fashion I tried to change their perception,’ he goes on. ‘That painting took Edward Burne-Jones four years, so I decided to paint it in four hours. I called it Post-Graffalite.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be disrespectful: I wasn’t suggesting that it came even ten percent to achieving the same artistic highness. But I enjoyed doing the painting, and what was the point of being the first graffiti artist in a public gallery without actually making a few statements? It did make a couple of the non-believers believe.’ The vast majority of the 38,000 people who visited the exhibition, many of whom didn’t expect to like the work, had nothing but positive feedback to give.

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In 2005, I collaborated with renowned graffiti artist Temper to produce a limited-edition 60-page book exploring his career so far.

Read more about Temper’s portfolio

Decade Collection

‘Ten years, crunched into an easily-digestible visual thing. For some people it’s just funky little characters. But it’s ten years of my life; a bubblegum version of the things that went on during that decade.’

Inspired by the Sex Pistols and Rock Steady Crew artwork, Temper developed a distinctive painting style first seen in ‘On a Creep Tip’. Despite a lukewarm reception at its first public showing in Birmingham, the piece’s value snowballed after it was pictured beside him in a Sunday supplement.

‘I was petrified that someone would rip off that style of drawing,’ he confesses. ‘Obviously that painting had been in thousands of Sunday Times all over the country.’ So Decade was born; partly to stamp ownership on the Temper technique, and partly to pay whistle-stop homage to his formative years.

From breaking on lino in the early hours to spraying outlines with Goldie, each canvas scratches the surface of one of countless episodes from 1982 to 1991. ‘Mic Check… 1, 2’ recalls a time when the Wild Bunch, later Massive Attack, were rapping and beatboxing in the Dungeons in Wolverhampton. When the UK scene was still defining itself, shortly after hip-hop spread across the pond, the canvas proudly brands the MC in red, white and blue.

Much more than just a series of snapshot experiences, Decade charts the artist’s development. So immediately after the shady furtiveness of ‘Creepin’, ‘On Time’ marks a turning point: ‘I was into youthful things,’ he smiles. ‘Then my girlfriend came along and showed me a different way of living.’

The collection is an edgy, colourful tribute to the colourful decade from which the Temper phenomenon was born. ‘Out of those ten years I could tell you a thousand stories, not just ten pictures. But there’s no way that I’d change any element of my life, good or bad.’

Read other copywriting case studies

In 2005, I collaborated with renowned graffiti artist Temper to produce a limited-edition 60-page book exploring his career so far.

Read more about Temper’s portfolio

The Good Die Young

Losing eight of your close family in a lifetime is devastating. Losing them in a single year is enough to tear your life apart. Racked with grief, Temper dealt with it in the best way he could: he picked up an aerosol can and began to spray his soul onto canvas. After two years of broken sleep, The Good Die Young was complete.

‘This was the start of me challenging myself: on canvas, mentally, technically, publicly,’ he asserts. ‘It was my introduction to this part of my life. People paint icons because they think they’ll sell – for me, this is a craft; this has a soul; this is about life and death. I put it down. I put it on the line.’

More than just ground-breaking, it was officially the UK’s first ever conceptual collection by an aerosol artist. The Good Die Young captures the bereavement process. It’s the work of a man questioning the nature of life itself; a man trying to make sense of a world in which your family can be plucked one by one from your grasp. The same world in which modern icons, adored by millions, can be cut off in their prime. And in a cramped, mouse-infested studio in Wolverhampton, Temper brought the likes of Hendrix, Lennon and Gandhi together in the black-and-white shades of mourning.

He had been stripped of his own relations, and these great figures – united by their vibrant lives and early deaths – helped to contextualise that loss. Each has a certain resonance: ‘Lady Diana’s complexion – the redness of her cheeks; her placid eyes; her hair colour – is so, so similar to my cousin Helen, who died when she was only 25,’ he confides. ‘And my uncle David was like Martin Luther King; he was a schoolteacher. He dropped down dead in front of a classroom full of children.’

‘Some people in the collection – like Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix – are linked with family members that I cherish, who are alive now. There’s an awful lot of reasons why they’re there. But the original idea was about bereavement; they had to be familiar figures for people to understand what loss is.’

With bars across the windows, no running water and no electricity, Temper worked deep into the night in the aptly-named Lucifer’s Loft, and half of the paint that spattered his 27 canvases was sprayed by flickering candlelight. Although not a religious man, the symbolism of the act struck a chord with the artist: ‘It was reminiscent of what you’d see in a church, when people light candles for those they’ve lost,’ he muses. The soft, atmospheric glow also brought a deeper subtlety to the wholly greyscale collection.

‘When you lose someone you feel angry; bitter; confused. You can’t understand why that person’s gone, and your mood in general is very black-and-white,’ he reasons. ‘I was confused; I questioned life, and there’s a numbness there. It also puts an age to the collection: the human brain conceives black-and-white as things past.’

‘It’s about people’s lives – their time – and that time being ended. But when I created these paintings, time was no object. I spent my time ignoring time, to highlight the end of time,’ Temper smiles, pleased to have summed up two years of emotionally-draining work so neatly. ‘To spend an hour working on a highlight; a day on a shadow, or getting the actual shape of an eyelid right to emphasise the soul of that person… the sacrifice of time to create that is what makes me an artist.’

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