To find authenticity: Saber interviewed

Few writers have a reputation as secure as Saber’s. The Los Angeles painter, a member of the MSK and AWR crews, built his name on wildstyle so dense and so large that it seemed to belong to architecture more than to lettering, and his vast piece on the bank of the Los Angeles River in the late 1990s is still spoken of as one of the biggest graffiti productions ever painted. He has since moved freely between pure abstraction and blunt political work. The record-breaking years may be behind him, but in a long conversation with the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost in spring 2016 he was as sharp and as candid as ever.

He was asked about progress, about fatherhood and about politics. His answers kept coming back to one idea, which gave the interview its title: that what matters in an art form is honesty, and that honesty is getting harder to find.

What graffiti teaches

Asked whether a lifetime of painting had taught him anything lasting, he described the road as a cycle of destroying, rebuilding and tearing down again. The good lesson and the bad lesson, he said, are the same one: graffiti teaches you about yourself.

He also argued that graffiti works as a small-scale model of the world. Cities, their politics and their economics are written on their walls, and he claimed that he can arrive in a city where he does not speak the language and understand a good deal of what is going on just by reading them. That kind of reading, built up over years, gives real insight. The confidence the life gives swings, he said: some days he feels unstoppable, on others as though the world is standing on his neck. What lasts is knowing how to push towards a goal, and a technical edge from painting at enormous scale.

Letters and message

He described his style as a powerful energy source caught mid-battle, and his rule as going big and painting hard. It has grown more than changed since he saw his first wildstyle as a boy.

He was able to name that first encounter precisely. It was at the Belmont Tunnels in Los Angeles in 1989, and he felt at once that the pieces were a way into something deeper. What drew him was the complexity of letters, their mathematical and esoteric side, and the more aggressive styles in particular. Asked whether he cared more for letters or for message, he refused the choice. The letters, he explained, sent him looking for a message, and in that sense the two cannot be separated.

What keeps him going

He answered with a list that mixed the mundane and the serious, from coffee and weed to the security of his family. When he started, he pointed out, graffiti offered no future at all and nobody cared. Now it is possible to plan for an end game, although no one, he added drily, is good enough until the cheque clears.

His visual language has stayed recognisable across his career, and he said what keeps it alive is the sense that he is still not good enough as a painter. There is a riddle in him that he has not solved, he said, and painting is the best way he has found to work on it. The distinctive style is simply what that search looks like.

Art and society

A few years earlier, in a conversation with Revok for Juxtapoz, Saber had said that art had lost touch with society. Asked whether he still believed it, he gave a more nuanced answer. Art tends to reflect the circumstances of the person making it, and so it reflects every part of society. What gets accepted, celebrated and rewarded, however, is decided by an elite who see to their own profits first. He summed up the arrangement with a two-word reference to The Hunger Games.

Painting with Zes

On his collaborations with Zes, he was generous. He said he has learned a great deal about painting from Zes and even more about life, and he called him one of the most important artists of their generation, one whose story has not yet been properly told. When the two of them paint together they barely speak. Their work looks different but comes from the same place: texture and layering, buffed walls and fat-cap lines stacked on top of each other.

A father at forty

The most personal part of the conversation concerned fatherhood. Saber said plainly that he is no longer out there. He is forty, with two children, has been through hell and back, and considers himself lucky to be alive. He argued that the word graffiti has to be earned continually, and that he can no longer claim it for himself or his work. He gave everything to it, he said, even at a cost to his own health, and had been bored with it for some time. If he is not going to go out and do the real thing, the new generation can have it.

He still sneaks in the odd tag, sometimes with his young daughter, but he described the life he led as volatile, and said that tough-guy posturing is no use when children need feeding and bills need paying. Graffiti, in his view, can be the most selfish act there is, and he no longer has the luxury of selfishness. He once thought graffiti would be his legacy. Now he sees that legacy in his family’s future and in his art. The lessons he passes on to his children are about how he sees the world, which he conceded are unorthodox.

Against the pretty wall

His influences these days are art in general, and he watches with interest where the post-graffiti movement is going. The difficulty is saturation, and he joked about his special senses for finding authenticity in the rubble before admitting he sounded like Donald Trump.

Pressed on whether he was really bored with graffiti, he backtracked a little: he still cranes his neck at rooftops from the freeway and loves graffiti even at its worst. What wears him down is endless name-writing with no sense of lineage, and the same weak piece painted a thousand times over in a safe, council-approved street art zone while the painter poses for selfies. His sharpest words were kept for the sanctioned mural of a pretty girl’s face, which he said he would rather see blasted with a fire extinguisher, and for writers who confuse a pose of toughness with substance. Illegal work earns some credit even when it is poor, he allowed, though poor work is still poor.

His challenge to younger painters was about contribution. His generation pushed each other as crews and as a movement to test every creative boundary, and those boundaries, he argued, have now been thoroughly explored. He finds it faintly absurd, at forty, to introduce himself to another adult as Saber, and said graffiti has become a commodity and a fashion parade on Instagram.

He accepted that anyone has to paint a thousand pieces or write their name ten thousand times to get anywhere. But without knowing your roots and building a larger vision, he said, you are just following the herd. Innovation is the key, and finding authenticity means being honest with yourself, your work and the people around you.

Asked finally to sum up his journey in three words, he declined, and managed to do it in exactly three words. His work and archive are online (saberone.com).