Hello Akut. Tell us about the beginnings of your art. What motivated you to make a profession out of it?<\/h3>\n
In my early days, my immediate sphere of influence was very restricted. I was a teenager in a small town in Thuringia in East Germany, the former GDR. It was a very sheltered childhood and lovely. I never lacked anything, and I always felt confident that one day, as an adult, I would travel the world. I was the second eldest, living in the same house as my parents and grandparents, so I didn\u2019t get noticed much. I could generally do as I pleased and quite early on that turned out to be painting. The fact that my painting ended up being graffiti was shaped by my social environment. There was an association, Villa K, which still exists today and is actually located in an old villa in my hometown, and even in those days it was the place to go for us teenagers. You got to know a lot of different groups of sprayers, breakdancers, hiphoppers and punks, and somewhere in the middle of all that was me. In those days, the only graffiti artists I knew were those around me or the really big ones. For me, the whole scene was a place of refuge, somewhere I could be alone in my thoughts, as it probably still is for lots of people now. But I had no real desire to do conventional graffiti or art in a broader sense. I just painted what I saw \u2013 and that was people. There was no plan that painting would eventually become my profession; it just happened. But I\u2019m glad it did, because I\u2019m really grateful to be able to earn a living doing what I love. At one point I did veer towards another plan and I started studying architecture in Erfurt.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>
But when I was there, I was very quickly encouraged to \u2018go and do art\u2019. At the time, I wasn\u2019t that sure where painting would lead me and I wanted to have a plan B and do something down-to-earth like an apprenticeship, so I switched to visual communication at Bauhaus Universit\u00e4t in Weimar. Of course, my parents were more supportive of that. But I was also able to combine my studies with painting as part of my graffiti crew, Ma\u2019Claim.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>
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