A Friday night for someone in their early twenties is typically filled with moments of anticipation. Often getting ready for a night of partying, they are prepared for practically any outcome. As is Sellout, a local Los Angeles street artist, but he isn’t exactly preparing for the same kind of night. Instead of heading to a bar with his contemporaries, he’s making his wheat paste, prepping his designs and spray cans all in preparation for his night of getting up.
Sellout didn’t grow up with an interest in art. He was raised an athlete and to him, art was merely a class. It wasn’t until he got a bit older and started to explore Los Angeles beyond his San Gabriel Valley suburb that his outlook on art began to change. The graffiti that covers billboards, freeways and the downtown area left him astounded. He began to dabble with tagging but really found his niche with wheat pasting. Wheat pasting is a form of street art that involves pasting an image or design on a surface with the adhesive of wheat paste.
“I was making these stencils, doing all these images and putting them out on the street, and then I realized it’s not productive to put out random images without having them tie back to something. So I started focusing on repeated images that would make people question ‘What does that mean? Who’s that from? What’s this about?’,” said Sellout.
He came with up an image of the Statue of Liberty, but instead of holding a torch, she is holding a foam finger in the shape of the West side hand signal with LA written on it. Over the years, he has depicted her holding various things such as beer and a keg, but the foam finger remains the most common. He began to put this image in every place that he could possibly think of. He soon settled on a style that incorporated wheat pasting, stencils and spray paint while encapsulating the strategic chaos of street art.
The act of going out at night became a habit to him. He took every opportunity to chase the adrenaline rush the practice provided. Whether he was spray painting, wheat pasting or mixing these mediums, he was almost always getting up. The better the spot, the more of a rush. He knew he was addicted and needed to keep chasing that high.
“When these bustling streets are asleep, there’s this feeling that you now have the street for yourself. It starts to feel like home,” said Sellout. “It becomes very easy to do and a very easy thing to fall in love with. When you fall in love with something like that, it becomes the time you start to do your best work.”
In Los Angeles, Sellout was able to quickly tap into this culture due to the inclusivity he experienced. The vastness of the city allowed him to get up in the different neighborhoods and leave his mark. This city is somewhere where he has been encouraged to pursue his personal style and express himself.
“[In LA] you can kind of escape the gatekeeping and do what you want to do in your own style. It has a massive opportunity for different forms of street art to be creative and set different trends,” said Sellout.
Among other Angelenos, Sellout emphasizes the importance of art in the streets. For many people, the streets function as a gallery or museum space.
“We got places where they want us to come paint on their wall. Sometimes they’ll [the owners] just look the other way because they know the notoriety of street art will help their businesses,” said Sellout.
Due to the sheer volume of images he would paste around the city, he was able to quickly build an audience and even began making some money from it. Galleries even began reaching out to him and offering him spots in shows. During this time of growth as a street artist, he injured his knee while playing basketball and is still suffering from the repercussions.
“I’ve had to put my street art kind of on hold because I can’t move like the way I used to. I can’t climb things. I can’t run. I can’t jump. So, I focus solely on studio art right now,” tells Sellout.
He is currently waiting to get surgery and is hopeful that he can return to the streets soon. But as he still pursues art, he finds that working in a studio has helped him boost his creativity.
“I find in myself that the street was a good place for me to do artwork and build myself in a marketing sense. Given my immobility, I now find that my biggest growth is when I’m able to do it in the studio. It’s not growth in a street art sense, but growth as an overall artist,” said Sellout. “I’m seeing that the stuff I’m putting on the canvas turns out to be way better than something I did 3 or 6 months ago. The studio is helping me mature a lot.”
As a street artist now bound to the studio, he has focused on translating the work and style he cultivated from the street to the canvas. The style that Sellout made for himself in the streets was primarily focused around one repetitive image, but now in the studio, he is challenged to go beyond that image. It wasn’t enough for him to simply duplicate what he did in the streets on a canvas. He needed more of a story.
To him, street art’s story heavily depended on placement — if a work was in what seemed to be an unreachable place, it left people wondering how it got there. Studio work doesn’t have this same appeal, it’s more tangible in the way that the artist controls how it’s installed.
“It [street art] tells its own story. There’s an element that if you just take that piece of street art and put it in a room, you’re taking away that story. What I’ve come to enjoy now is that I reminisce about the stories of the street and try to create every piece with a story,” said Sellout.
A narrative wasn’t apparent in his early work and it took this time confined to the studio to realize how much a story helps with the making of art. This genre of street art-inspired works has a market in the gallery realm due to its surge in popularity in the 2010s. Early in his career, Sellout never thought there would be a space for graffiti and street artists in galleries. But even as he now works in various shows, he feels like times have changed for street art, but not for graffiti. He understands street art as something that’s all-encompassing, but graffiti has to do specifically with lettering.
“That kind of imagery [graffit lettering] has not cemented itself fully in the gallery world. I’m not saying there aren’t galleries that don’t represent really good graffiti artists because there are. But the commercial value of graffiti still hasn’t broken away from vandalism in a commercial sense,” said Sellout.
There is a bit of tension with graffiti and gallery street artists — given graffiti culture and the principles of the practice. But Sellout thinks it goes beyond the foundations of the practice and that the conflict stems from the opportunities that street artists were faced with.
“I think graffiti artists want an opportunity, but they’re so stuck in their ways and so stringent upon graffiti because graffiti is a way of life. You break that way of life, then everyone around you is no longer gonna call you a graffiti artist. You kind of lost this identity,” explains Sellout.
Sellout admits to the paradox that street artists can live off their work while graffiti artists do just as good of work but are understood by the art world and treated by society like vandals. This cultural divide causes a rift between these groups who participate in similar practices.
“Between graffiti and street art is that there’s a little bit of, like ‘Fuck these guys because they’re making money and we aren’t.’ But a lot of the cool guys have moved on from being just graffiti artists and have been creative enough to break into the gallery world, and when they do so, it’s all loved,” said Sellout.
Sellout is currently living as a full-time artist. He continues to expand his style within his studio and hopes to make it back to the streets post-operation. When he isn’t in the studio painting, he works as a barber doing what he considers just a different kind of artistry. Between barbery and painting, he is able to finance his art projects and continue contributing to the Los Angeles street art scene.