SKEME

John Cecil Dash, who writes as SKEME, was born in New York on 28 November 1964 and began painting the subway in his early teens. He is best known to a wide audience through Style Wars, Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant's 1983 documentary, in which he appears at eighteen alongside his mother in an exchange that has become one of the most quoted passages in the literature of the form. Asked why he does it, he answers that he does it for himself and for other writers — not for the public, who in his account are not the audience at all.

That position is the clearest statement anyone has made of graffiti's internal logic. The work is addressed to the people who can read it: made under a set of standards, risks and rivalries that operate entirely within the writing community, and indifferent to whether the passenger on the platform approves. Everything that followed — the museum exhibitions, the market, the debate about vandalism — has been conducted around a practice that was never asking for any of it.

His painting is in the classic New York manner of the early 1980s: interlocking letters, arrows and connectors, high-contrast fills, executed at the scale of a whole car. He was among the more prolific writers of his generation and was photographed extensively for Subway Art.

After Style Wars he joined the United States Army and served for twenty-eight years, retiring in 2010 — a period that accounts for his long absence from the exhibition record while contemporaries were being collected in Europe. He has since returned to painting and to public life within the culture.

His return to painting has been on the same terms as before. The work has not been restyled for a gallery audience, and the letterforms are the ones he was using in 1982 — which, given how thoroughly that vocabulary has been absorbed and diluted since, now reads less as conservatism than as accuracy.

He has held a solo exhibition, 3 Yard King, at Galleria Varsi in Rome, the first artist that gallery exhibited.

AT A GLANCE

Born 28 November 1964, New York, NY, USA

Lives and works in the United States

3 Yard King, Galleria Varsi, Rome, Italy