Graffiti Art Gives South African Artist a Unique Identity

He is a graffiti artist and his name is Falko Fantastic. Fantastic is what his art is as he uses his imagination to paint his graffiti to brighten up unsightly spaces, such as crumbling buildings, moss-ridden walls, and any other space that he finds interesting.

Falko possesses the eye of a true artist to render his graffiti that includes animals, human forms, and other objects. However, it is not only the art but how he uses the objects and structures in and around the space that is something to behold. Take for example his graffiti of the bodies of two sitting giraffes on a wall with their necks an extension of two light poles or the rhino with its horn depicted by a floating horn-shaped cloud.

It seems Falko did not have a happy childhood, his family was evicted from District Six in Cape Town and compelled to settle down in Mitchells Plain. But, even as a three-year-old, he showed a keen interest in art. He started out as a signwriter. However, his love for art made him enroll at Peninsula Technikon in Cape Town, South Africa, to learn graphic designing. But this did not satisfy him because “they were not teaching you to be an artist but teaching you to be part of the machine of design.” Besides, this course would have kept him indoors, whereas he wanted to be on the streets, painting walls.

Making a career out of graffiti art took some time. Falko shares on dailymaverick.co.za, “Graffiti was never something I set out to do. Where I went to school there was no art class, no art teachers, but we were allowed to paint on the walls, basically because everything was so derelict.”

Falko found fame with his elephants’ graffiti. This conceptual art creation not only gave him an identity, but also a sizeable social media fan following leading to international fame. This encouraged him to choose graffiti art as a viable career. His recent work, ‘Once Upon a Town’ was documented as a short film, showing him traveling across South Africa and meeting with ethnic communities of the region.

Falko Fantastic

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