First Spray Painting – Rodney Wills RAD1 / RAD1visuals
First Spray Painting – Rodney Wills RAD1 / RAD1visuals
Spray-painted Dad’s shed behind the house in Sycamore, Alabama, 1981.
I suppose this story will be my brief introduction to how I became involved with Hip Hop. During high school at the Alabama School of the Arts, I became involved in Hip Hop in 1981. Hip Hop is comprised of music, dance, and art, but I was initially only aware of the first two aspects.
At the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA), we attended regular school hours during the day, and in the afternoon, when other high schools let out or start football practice, we began our afternoon art classes. During the afternoon classes, we were allowed to play our music at our cubicle art stations. I was most likely listening to DEVO at that time.
My buddies were listening to their music as well. On one particular day, I overheard a piece of music that captivated my attention and piqued my interest enough for me to walk over and give it a closer listen. My buddy Melvin Tuck had a song playing that I did not understand, but I was drawn into it. I asked about it, and Melvin laughed and said, “These are the baddest white dudes on the planet!” The song was the 1981 release “Numbers” by the German electronic group Kraftwerk, and I was hooked!
It wouldn’t be long before we were kicking off our shoes and using our socks to quickly move on the shiny, slick floors of our common area, working on breakdance moves. Of course, Melvin was mastering the moves, and we emulated along!
My art instructor, Dan McCurdy, popped into my cubicle one day and handed me an art magazine, saying there is a “visual art” side to what we were doing. I read the magazine article about an artist creating art with spray paint that was connected to the Hip Hop movement happening in NYC. There was only one photo of a guy standing next to a small canvas hanging on the wall of a studio. Honestly, I did not visually see the connection between the art, dance, and music as spoken about as the elements of Hip Hop. The artist featured in the magazine article was Fred Brathwaite, also known as Fab Five Freddy.
The art on the canvas from that early magazine article bears a striking resemblance to this piece. With that, hopefully, you can see how I was not connecting the dots visually from that one-page magazine article with only one photo of Fred Brathwaite leaning up against the wall and a painting hanging on the wall – that was it! Yo! MTV Raps would not start until August 6, 1988.
However, the topic was often discussed with my buddies during our afternoon art classes, of which a *senior classmate also overheard. With my newfound fascination with the Hip Hop movement, I took some leftover silver and red spray paint from my dad’s small metal shed behind our house and spray-painted the motifs that I had already been experimenting with in my art at school. I didn’t paint any letters as Mr. Brathwaite spoke of “coded messages” in the magazine article. But my dad did wear a Yoshimura t-shirt that looked like “3=47!” Not that I depicted that on the shed, but you can see a little bit of symbiotic scribble in there.
Side note: That was my Honda CM400 in the garage, so I wasn’t 16 years old yet! I got my Kawasaki Spectre 750 at the age of 16! However, in Alabama, you could obtain your motorcycle license at the age of 14. This is how I commuted to and from high school.
My classmate David Manual’s cousin, *Ladonna, also attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts, but was a year ahead of us. She would soon be attending Atlanta College of Art, often returning with the latest mixtape, as Atlanta, Georgia, was more progressive than Birmingham, Alabama. It was she who also told me about a style writer and artist attending the same college, and she mentioned that he was not very talkative, because I was begging her to talk with him and ask questions for me! I had to wait TWO YEARS to find out just what this graffiti thing is and how it pertains to Hip Hop! David would also be my roommate during our time at the Atlanta College of Arts and dealt with my craziness of meeting up and hanging out with The United Kings. Needless to say, our dorm room was a bit covered in spray paint.
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