The sidewalk scenery in Melbourne is in full bloom every day of the year, from fresh spurts of color and line to the lasting remnants of epic masterpieces painted on the exterior of the city’s buildings.

Decorated walls along train tracks, laneways, and shopping centers are a familiar sight to Melbourne city dwellers, but not so familiar are the faces behind the art, the people that have spent years learning and developing their artistic skills and have traveled the world showcasing their work. Melbourne’s own New2 is one such graffiti artist, a man who has spent thirty years cultivating his art, or as it is called in graffiti terminology, his writing.

As a kid in the early eighties, he said the culture mainly revolved around “bad soft metal bands, fighting and patches on army jackets”, and that his interest in graffiti stemmed from the newly imported Hip Hop movement. “Hip Hop as it was marketed to the world then was a new exciting phenomena to 10-12 year olds and provided a great alternative. It was partly an attractive safe haven or D.I.Y. community where kids who felt marginalized from all walks of life could come together and engage,” he says.

Along with the new movement, came his appropriately inventive new name, New2, when he and fellow prominent graffiti artist Tame were brainstorming together. Though initially a concoction of random ideas, his name has become a platform for expression. “The word New… I have to continually try and find new ways to fit what I want to express in those three letters, somehow. It may sound like some sort of ridiculous penance, but the art form is name-writing and I kind of have limited myself to those confines. I have little interest in doing figurative work.”

The city of New York, a haven for graffiti artists and an ever hanging canvas for the art they create is made up of five boroughs, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island and each of these boroughs has it’s distinct art form.

“I always imagined if NYC had a 6th borough with its own original style, what would it be?” Says New2, “I tried to paint that style as a kid.” When he first began writing he started with the Melbourne bent-stem letters, which was inspired by a small element of New York City style but which then evolved into it’s own here in Melbourne. Over the years he has worked with different styles, heraldry, illuminated scripts and art nouveau.

“In the last five years or so I’ve increasingly let other personal interests cross the border into my lettering. Science fiction and the space race that I was obsessed with as a child before I began painting crept in. The organic swirls have become more like orbital paths. I also reference psychedelic poster art and use elements from physics; I throw in a little symbolic content, observations on the writing movement and the occasional joke.” He says of his current style.

The ‘high expectations of the Melbourne writing scene’ have helped New2 to push himself beyond the status quo and aim to create an authentic voice within the international movement.

But it is not only the art that pushes him to excel, the graffiti art community has taught him about discipline and hard work, conflict resolution, how to balance creative and pragmatic concerns and “how to laugh or at least be levelheaded in the midst of the most horrific circumstances”. There are lessons and years of life experience behind the colorful sprawling masterpieces that have sprouted on the cities walls. Although he started out as, in his words, a little autocrat, painting his way through Melbourne’s transit system with the motto ‘for us, by us’ and discovering that tertiary art wasn’t for him, he has developed his own well respected style and now writes all over the world and has shown in galleries in the US and Europe. Now living abroad, he has married fellow graffiti artist Ephameron and travels the world working on different artistic projects.

He says of what is to come, “I just want to seek out further possibilities for letters and enjoy doing it with my peers. Maybe now there is an increase in self-exploration in what I do. Better living through letter form!”