Stayhigh 149

Wayne Roberts, who wrote as STAY HIGH 149, was born in Virginia on 20 October 1950, moved to New York as a child and grew up in the Bronx. He began writing around 1971, in the first wave that followed TAKI 183, and within two years had produced the single most copied image in the history of graffiti.

The figure came from the title sequence of the television series The Saint: a stick man with a halo, which Roberts redrew with a smoking joint replacing the Saint's stick, and set alongside his name. The Smoker, as it became known, spread across the subway system and then across the world, reproduced by writers who in many cases had no idea whose it was. It was among the first character logos in graffiti — the moment the form acquired an image as well as a signature.

His lettering was equally distinctive: elongated, leaning, drawn with a wide marker in a single confident motion, with the number 149 taken from 149th Street. The whole vocabulary was built for speed, and its elegance is the elegance of something done fast and repeatedly by someone very good at it.

Roberts stopped writing in the mid-1970s and disappeared from the culture entirely for two decades, a period he spoke about afterwards with candour. He resurfaced in the year 2000, was welcomed back by a generation of writers who had grown up copying his figure, and worked and exhibited in a modest way until his death in New York on 11 June 2012.

He never built the career that his influence would have supported, and he was not collected by the museums that acquired his contemporaries. The imbalance was noted at his death and remains the plainest illustration of how unevenly recognition has been distributed across this generation. His image, meanwhile, is still everywhere.

AT A GLANCE

Born 20 October 1950, Virginia, USA

Died 11 June 2012, New York, NY, USA