An Interview with Popx: The Stop Wars Artist

How did you first start out as an artist?
There are three ways that I look into ‘how I got into it’. One is past lives. I believe that you don’t get given these gifts out of thin air. I believe it’s based on ‘whatever you get in life, you earn it’. You reap what you sow. I believe through hard work in past lives I gained the skill to be able to copy a picture of what I see onto a page or whatever and to do it well. Then there’s genetics. I inherited my Dad's artistic genes. He’s quite a good artist as well. He used to sketch and paint. The other thing is the environment. In this life there are things that influence me. When I was fifteen I got into graffiti. I saw the documentary Style Wars and that same night I designed my first New York style piece. After that I became a graffiti artist for seven years. My first piece was a Richie piece, then I did an Outlaw piece, then I did a Popsi piece. From that I became known as Popx. Before that I was a mod. I was only about fourteen but I used to follow the big mods around and look for fights and that. That was our culture at the time. We just wanted to be like the people in Quadrophenia or something.

What do you think to the current Notts graffiti scene..?
I don’t pay it very much attention at all these days. I know some of the guys who still do it. I’m only interested in graf as part of art in general. I’ll look at a piece of art, whatever it is and wonder why the person chose that, rather than anything else. Of all the various forms in the universe, someone has chosen to look at that and put it forward to be viewed. I always find it interesting. In that sense I’m always interested to see what kind of graffiti develops and what messages they bring forward.

There was a time when I didn’t even want to know anyone if they weren’t a graffiti artist…unless they were a girl. I’m not proud of my mentality when I was a graffiti writer, I’ve moved on so much since then. I can understand it, because I experienced it. I’m still interested in my old heroes, like ‘Seen’ and ‘Artful Dodger’. He was a big influence for me in Nottingham because I remember just before I started doing graf he had his Weetabix billboards up and then he had his tag on the bus that I was sitting on and it just blew my mind. He was definitely the first major local influence.

Tell us about another piece of yours, Maturing Friendliness…
I meditated on all the things I could have called it, out of all the things you can name anything, you know, ‘what is the most useful thing I can call this’. It’s a scene of an actual star system nicknamed the seven sisters, called the Pleiades. The face is a woman that represents mankind really. I’m trying to talk about the possibility of life throughout the universe because to me everything is alive. Everything is vibrating energy. This talk of life on Mars… to me Mars is life.

So you believe in life on other planets..?
I truly believe that there are humans throughout space. I don’t believe that earth is the only place with humanoids, you know, two legs, two arms, upright head, you know what I mean? From my own studies I’ve come to believe that they live on higher frequencies usually. So we can’t see them, but if they want to be seen, as they often do, like thousands of people have reported seeing UFOs, they just slow their vibration down to our vibration and become visible to us. They can then speed it back up again and become invisible and that’s how they do it. Apparently some ‘crop circles’ are made by them, although some are obviously faked.

Because of that I paint stars a lot, because of the inspiration to share that possibility or idea, which to me is a definite because I’ve really looked into it. While I was in New Zealand I checked out www.ufoevidence.org it’s got loads of photos of a variety of types of UFO’s in the sky… and I’ve seen one myself as well.