Essex-based street artist Scotty Irving, aka Brave Arts, has been creating spray can art for over 30 years. Tracy Jenkins, Public Art Manager for Art UK's murals programme, met up with Scotty to talk about graffiti, murals, spray cans and the explosion of street art across the UK.

Scotty Irving (Brave Arts)

Scotty Irving (Brave Arts)

Tracy Jenkins, Art UK: Tell us a bit about yourself.

Scotty Irving: I am Scotty. I've been into graffiti art since I first saw it in 1987 when I was 12 years old.

In 1997 I started a business called 'Brave Arts' doing spray can art, teaching street art and doing commissions. I had a few different tags – a tag is a persona, or how people know each other – but in the mid-1990s I settled on 'Brave'. I've been spray painting street art since then. People used to call it graffiti!

Scotty at work during Concrete Canvas, 2023

Scotty at work during Concrete Canvas, 2023

As well as a career in the creative industries, I've worked with young people and in lots of schools. I've taken my art workshops into prisons, worked in secure units with young offenders, and worked in the Tate and the V&A. My work has enabled me to share my passion for art with a wide range of different people.

Dawnette Fessey

Dawnette Fessey 2023

Brave Arts

Westcliff Station, Station Road, Westcliff

I went to college in Croydon, where I studied graphic design. I wrote a paper on graffiti, which asked the question: 'Who are the graffiti artists talking to?' Are they concerned about what the public thinks or is this part of an elaborate, exclusive visual language? I compared graffiti and the use of space by sanctioned advertising, and graffiti signatures/tags to corporate identities. This led to a thesis about graffiti: I did interviews with everybody from the police to art teachers, and kids that had got into trouble for painting their names. This was in the 1990s, before the internet and way before Banksy had revolutionised the perception of this art form.

Smack My Glitch Up

Smack My Glitch Up 2024

Brave Arts

Pier Hill, Southend-on-Sea

My thesis predicted that mural painting in the future would generally lean towards using spray paint. At that time, we had started to see the development of spray paint products that were intended for artists. Pretty soon, manufacturers developed colour palettes especially for 'spray-can' artists, nozzles and different cap types. All this was monumental for the culture's development: years spent learning how to handle terrible car paint meant we mastered the new paint brands super fast.

Tracy: Are you an Essex boy?

Scotty: Yes, I would say I am! Half of my family settled in Basildon from Guyana and the other half are from London or Essex. Basildon is where I was born. I went to college in Thurrock and then I went to university in South London before returning to Southend. Essex has historically been fertile ground for graffiti and street art culture. Between Southend and Chelmsford, graffiti artists have collaborated, battled, pushed each other to evolve and inspired each other.

Glitched 'Miss Wong'

Glitched 'Miss Wong' 2022

Brave Arts

Clarence Road, Southend

Tracy: When did you first discover you had a skill for creating art?

Scotty: I was always drawing when I was a kid, and I was always interested in art. I wanted to do other things, like music, but it didn't come as naturally as drawing.

When I was around 11 or 12, in the town where I lived, New York City-style graffiti appeared. Someone had done tags and a really crude piece. I thought it was the coolest thing ever – so punk and so rebellious! Break dancing and hip-hop style had just landed too, which went hand-in-hand with the graffiti.

Scotty Irving, 1990

Scotty Irving, 1990

My friends and I soon discovered those who tagged our town had accessed an abandoned warehouse where they did their larger paintings. It was in that warehouse where I first picked up a spray can. I knew then that this new art form was my thrill and that I was going to take it seriously!

Market

Market 2023

Brave Arts

Victoria Road, Chelmsford

Tracy: What type of graffiti were you creating at that time?

Scotty: Initially it involved a lot of drawing and designing of letters, development of characters and style, and a lot of battling with the medium. It wasn't easy using spray cans which were not developed for art. Somewhere along the line, that struggle informed me how to use paint in more ways than just painting letters: I did a portrait, a series of black and white faces, which was my eye-opening moment. It's probably why I never learned to paint properly with a brush: spray paint just excited me from day one, and it still does.

Rainsford Lane Pedestrian Underpass

Rainsford Lane Pedestrian Underpass 2023

Brave Arts

Rainsford Lane, Chelmsford

Tracy: Does your background influence the art you create?

Scotty: I was heavily into music, and I was a rapper in a band. We put out white label records. Hip-hop culture had all the elements for us to express ourselves – dance, fashion, music, art, poetry – so that gave me the framework to explore self-expression. Our influence was the older kids in our community, naturally the more rebellious, the more influential.

Tracy: When did you decide you wanted to make a living from doing art?

Scotty: At university, I did summer sports coaching for kids. I was asked to organise some art activities and did a graffiti workshop. It went really well and made the local paper, quite controversially – some people hated it, and some people loved it.

Parkway Underpass

Parkway Underpass 2022

Brave Arts

Parkway, Chelmsford

I did a little freelance graphic design but couldn't get a job. So, I did more training which saw me enrol on a course with the 'Eastern Arts Board' for artists in residence, which taught me about going into schools and working with teachers.

I did my first residency and that enabled me to get the ball rolling to do more. Soon after that, I got a job as a youth worker. In that role, it wasn't just about graffiti and art: we were dealing with all sorts of issues with young people. I did a lot of work with excluded young people who would not engage with regular provision. I am still doing the same type of work now.

Parkway Underpass

Parkway Underpass 2022

Brave Arts

Parkway, Chelmsford

So teaching, supporting my community and doing youth work actually worked in harmony with my passion for art. People get excited about using a spray can, it's fun and can be a great motivator or springboard to grow.

Tracy: At a festival, people expect your glitched signature work, but your jam walls are more fantasy creatures. Do you feel constrained because people expect a certain style from you?

Scotty: The artist SHOK, who was a big influential figure in the early UK graffiti art scene, once spoke to me about the importance of developing a signature style. Before I started doing glitches, there were a few themes that ran through my work. People would say 'I can spot your piece a mile off', because of the way I stylised my letters. I also used to play with traditional B-boy-style characters' faces, from cartoons to photorealism: I wanted to push the boundaries of what people came to expect from 'graffiti art'.

Scotty at work during Concrete Canvas, 2023

Scotty at work during Concrete Canvas, 2023

About 10 years ago, I started painting the first seven-eyed tigers. So, I have been all over the place, influenced by everything, and that's where I like to be! My work is only knitted together by the medium and its placement in the public realm. A street art festival is a sanitised version of the art form, so it follows that what I might paint there would be in keeping with that.

Tracy: How did the glitched murals develop?

Scotty: The glitches came out of working with a youth group at Firstsite in Colchester. The group were painting watercolours, taking digital images of them, opening these on the computer in a text program and randomly removing sections of the code! Viewing the corrupted images proved interesting. Some of the results were pretty, so I suggested that we try painting the corrupted images. Naturally, I used spray paint.

 
 
 
 
 
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A post shared by Scotty Brave. Artist (@brave_arts)

The first glitch pieces were six-by-six-foot interpretations of the abstracted images. I tried different ways of spraying through and on things, printing with plastic bags and stuff. I got right outside of my comfort zone and miles away from painting graffiti letters: I started to see that the glitched thing could work on many levels. I soon started doing it with images of people's faces.

Glitched Sir David Attenborough

Glitched Sir David Attenborough 2021

Brave Arts

Clarence Road, Southend

One of the most fun and challenging aspects is relying on the computer to mash up an image. The computer doesn't know about the colours available to you or the colours that you tend to use next to each other, so it chucks things together and puts combinations of colours on top of each other that you have never considered.

Glitched Grayson Perry

Glitched Grayson Perry 2022

Brave Arts

Rainsford Road, Chelmsford

Tracy: Street art and street art festivals have exploded in recent years. Is there a danger of boom and bust?

Scotty: I've been at this for 30 years. Today, everybody wants to be a street artist! I'm not surprised: it's great fun! I have always campaigned for this kind of celebration of the culture: it's my regular mindset to walk down a street and think, 'That would be a good place for a mural', so for me, it's exciting. It's like we've collectively manifested this interest. Is it overkill? Does it cheapen it? I don't know, maybe.

Parkway Underpass

Parkway Underpass 2022

Brave Arts

Parkway, Chelmsford

Tracy: Is there enough space for everyone on available walls?

Scotty: In the UK, it was at the Bristol street art festival Upfest that people realised this was going to become an issue. They flew people in from all over the world, and they did amazing paintings throughout Bristol. Then, they wanted to do Upfest again but there wasn't enough space, so they had to paint over brilliant pieces painted only a year earlier. The same is happening in Southend. Pieces are going up that are absolutely fantastic, and people fall in love with them, they become iconic landmarks – and then they just get painted over. I'm not sure that gives value or takes value from what we do!

Bollards

Bollards 2022

Concrete Canvas Artists (active since 2022)

Barrack Square, Chelmsford

In Chelmsford for Concrete Canvas, so far, they have tried to find new walls every time. None of the things that have been done before have been painted over, but that cannot go on forever. So that is a shame, but as a street artist you tend to have to accept your work doesn't often achieve longevity. You understand your work is at the mercy of other people, whether they are more accomplished artists or newbies just starting out. It doesn't make it right, it's just how it is!

Tracy: Some paint festivals struggle to get funding, as funds are spread to so many places.

Scotty: These modern festivals have managed to get loads of people coming to give their art away, mostly for free. When we are given the means to showcase our work amongst our peers, we do so flamboyantly and with vigour, but often largely self-funded. This can be problematic, especially in terms of diversity if the only people painting are the ones who can afford it!

Scotty at work during Concrete Canvas, 2023

Scotty at work during Concrete Canvas, 2023

So, whilst these big street art festivals are great, they can be a little exploitative. It's certainly a sure way to generate business, but not necessarily business for the artists themselves. Some of these bigger festivals might have 300 artists paint and only a select handful will get paid. In Chelmsford, Concrete Canvas have tried to pay as many artists as possible, as getting money into artists' pockets ensures the creation of more art.

Glitched Carol Vorderman

Glitched Carol Vorderman 2023

Brave Arts

Bramshott Road, South Sea, Portsmouth

Tracy: Tell us more about how you run your graffiti workshops and teach responsible practice.

Scotty: People can get in a lot of trouble doing street art! So, I address this straight away, especially when I'm working with young people. I share my own experiences and those of people I know. The message is: 'Here's how you can do it and stay out of trouble'. Even if your artwork is brilliant, the person who owns the property might not agree and may decide to prosecute you.

Scotty Irving being interviewed by ITV at the launch of Art UK's murals project, 2024

Scotty Irving being interviewed by ITV at the launch of Art UK's murals project, 2024

Mark-making with a can is the focus of what I teach – how to make successful marks to produce that picture in your mind or in your sketchbook. It is a tricky thing to get used to a spray can, so often my workshops involve making a big picture together (alongside me or other experienced artists).

I use a variety of techniques to make people feel confident and step out of their comfort zone. There are quick ways to show people in a classroom environment how to develop letters in their style based on their handwriting. People often don't recognise their unique writing style can be built into graffiti writing.

At the one-day festival in Westcliff, I painted an 'open mural' and had a queue of people painting with me on a boarded-up shop – young, old, mums, dads, nans, people from out of town and the people who lived upstairs. I worked with over 100 people on that piece and some have been telling me how they walk past it every day and point to the bit they helped to paint. I love enabling that kind of community effort.

Rainsford Lane Pedestrian Underpass

Rainsford Lane Pedestrian Underpass 2023

Brave Arts

Rainsford Lane, Chelmsford

Tracy: Do you think there may be pushback against the use of spray paints associated with environmental concerns?

Scotty: I would like to think so. It would be good if a brand came out that took back your old cans because that's always been a problem. How do you dispose of the cans responsibly?

Some people say they will use eco paints that absorb carbon, but I am not sure how effective that is. I've heard the research is flawed and that once the art is painted over the effectiveness is zilch. At least they no longer contain CFCs!

Glitched Pink Lady

Glitched Pink Lady 2023

Brave Arts

Market Road, Chelmsford

If someone developed a more environmentally friendly spray can, it would likely be more expensive. Paint is expensive – it's doubled in price in the past few years. Some people will paint with anything but the brands are all different: one will come out misty, another more splodgy, so it's good to use a mix. Not much of anything we do in the creative industries is eco-friendly, but I see that changing in some places.

 

 

Tracy: Tell us about other artists who inspire you.

Scotty: Artists who push the boundaries of what is possible with a spray can have always inspired me – 'Church of best ever', 'Ed Hicks', 'Zurik_1', 'revs'. How they apply their paint, how they use design and how their processes differ remain a constant source of inspiration.

Outside of the spray-can-art-world and when I first discovered art books at school, I was inspired by Salvador Dalí. My peers, the people I have grown up with, bounce ideas off each other. I am grateful for the inspiration handed down from the graffiti pioneers. In the 1970s and '80s, they virtually created a new art form for us to build on.

Bell Meadow Underpass

Bell Meadow Underpass 2024

Brave Arts and Candy Joyce and Gnasher

Parkway, Chelmsford

Tracy: Where can we see your work, aside from Art UK?

Scotty: You can see my work on the streets. I have a few in Chelmsford and a couple in Southend, on the London Road, that have been around for a few years now. I'm often creating new temporary pieces in the 'halls of fame' around London and Essex.

My canvases are on sale at 70 The Broadway, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. Or you can visit the shop on my website braveone.co.uk

Tracy Jenkins, Art UK Public Art Manager and Scotty Irving, Artist

This content was created as part of the Art UK Murals Digitisation and Engagement programme