Ben Eine

28-Jul-2010
The street artist who's made it to the White House. In July 2010 his work has caught the attention of the world after a canvas was given to President Obama.

Ben Eine is one of London’s most prolific and original street artists.  Anyone who visits East London on a regular basis will be familiar with the giant letters and words that adorn his preferred canvas: the walls and shop shutters of many businesses. 

Eine specialises in producing huge letters on shop fronts across London.  From single letters to complex and wry combinations, Eine’s alphabet can be found throughout London.  His huge individual letters on shop shutters are in a style he has made his own, originality, a distinctive style and a clear profile sets his letters apart from all others.

Ben Eine is not just a master graffiti artist though he is also the man behind the printing of some of the most iconic works to come out of the Pictures on Walls studio over the last five years. Eine’s screen printing skills have helped produce some of street arts most sort after prints from arguably the greatest street artist on the planet including Banksy, Faile and his own work.

Eine’s work has been exhibited in New York,Los Angeles,  Tokyo and all over Europe including V1 in Copenhagen (with Banksy) and Collette in Paris.  His painting commissions have also taken him worldwide and include trips to Israel, Australia and India. His artwork has featured on the debut album cover of Scandinavian band Alphabeat; an accolade which has only further cemented him as a well respected commercial artist.



Ben Eine at work in London


Ben Eine at work on one of his giant letters in London.

Photograph: Sven Davis/Arrestedmotion.com

'So it's been a weird day today," says the most recent posting on Ben Eine's website. "David Cameron has given one of my paintings to President Obama." Weird indeed. You wake up one morning as a street artist known to few outside the aficionados of Britain's urban art scene, and go to bed as the man whose work the new prime minister, for his first official visit to Washington, chose to present to the president of the United States.

"It's quite mad, really," says Eine (real name Ben Flynn), whose early creative life as a particularly productive graffiti artist earned him 15 or 20 arrests, five convictions for criminal damage and, on the final occasion, a narrow escape from jail. "But it's OK. It's not the kind of recognition I seek or get every day, but Cameron seems quite a positive kind of guy and Obama's a dude. I would probably have had issues if it had been for Bush."

But the gift – and attendant publicity – should bring Eine more than recognition. Described by the Nelly Duff gallery in London's Columbia Road, which has been selling his work for the last five years, as "a screen printer of technical brilliance . . . one of the hardest-working and most prolific street artists working today", he can also expect a considerable improvement in his income.

"We've had very significant interest already," says the gallery's Cassius Colman. "He had a fairly large fan base among people who know about street art, but now . . . If people were considering a purchase, this will push them over the edge. I'd say we were probably looking at a tenfold increase in his sales."

Eine, 39, is best known in and around Shoreditch in the East End of London, where he has worked for several years with his close friend, the elusive Banksy. "They're the best of mates, old friends," says Lindsay Alkin, manager of the Artrepublic gallery in Brighton, which also sells the artist's work. "Banksy would do one side of the street and Ben the other, and Ben did all Banksy's screenprints. He's one of the founders of the whole street-art movement. But this is really going to broaden his audience: we've had a great deal of interest this morning. And we've sold one of his originals."

Eine last came to the media's attention when he persuaded the shopkeepers of Middlesex Street in Spitalfields to allow him to paint the entire alphabet, in his trademark vibrant, cheerful colours, on their closed security shutters. Elsewhere in London, his letters spell out whole words – "Exciting" or "Scary" or "Vandalism" – on walls and buildings, or just stand on their own: a solitary "e" or "a" adorning a shopfront or telecomm box. There's a Googlemap of his London work, but similar typographical totems can also be seen in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles and Paris, as well as Newcastle and Hastings, where he now lives.

"For me, it's mostly about having stuff on the street," Eine says. "You're walking down the street, you do it every day, and suddenly there's something that wasn't there yesterday: something bright and cheerful and different. It might stay there for a year; maybe it will disappear. But you know, I have a family, I have a mortgage, I have to make a living. So I do the screenprints too." (Among the cognoscenti, Eine is widely admired as an expert screenprinter, and holds the unofficial world record for the number of colours across an edition: 77 across 200 prints.)

It wasn't easy, once Downing Street had called to say Samantha Cameron really liked his work, to find an Eine suitable for a US president. "A lot of my paintings have quite negative meanings, but painted in a bright and cheerful way," Eine says. "All of those had to be written off straight away; you can't give something that might be misinterpreted." Eventually, he remembered his painting of the letters TWENTYFIRSTCENTURYCITY, laid out on black, in seven rows. "I emailed it, and they said yes straight away," Eine says. "It works pretty well, I think."

Will he sell more work now? "I would imagine, people being what they are, that some more of them might want a piece of it. It's definitely good news."

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