For 36-year-old Maxwell Southgate, better known as Mak1One in the graffiti community, his romance with graffiti germinated when he was 11. And 23 years later, Mak1One has branded himself; his graffiti have titivated the once barren walls of the Central Business District (CBD) to one of Cape Town’s most happening streets, Long Street, and District 6, to name a few. [break]
Without any formal training in art, and someone who didn’t even graduate from high school, he credits experience and not education for his successful career.
As a kid growing up in Cape Flats, a place segregated for non-white people during the apartheid era, was already tough.
Also known as the birthplace of hip-hop in Cape Town and the “Bronx of South Africa”, according to Mak1One, the young art enthusiast walked for hours looking for artists doing graffiti.
“When I spotted someone [or something], I stood there for hours copying it [graffiti] with my eyes,” says the soft-spoken artist.
But today, people stop by Long Street when they spot one of many Mak1One’s creations. Standing outside Mr. Pickwicks, one of Long Street’s graffiti-filled eateries, he points out to the door.
As he steps closer trying to save himself from the chilly winter rain, he stands next to it and says, “Here, I wanted to show that everything comes from a spray can.” It’s his graffiti of a man whose head he has replaced with a spray can.
While Mak1One’s piece of art stands poignant as passersby pass Mr Pickwick, the restaurant and bar has more to offer in this two-story “alternative” venue.
Barry Bradley, owner of the restaurant, says that he was so fed up of people trashing the toilets with graffiti that he decided to invite artists to do actual graffiti all over the place. And that’s how he found Mak1One who painted the front façade of the place.
Walking down Long Street, to the right at Church Street, is Mak1One’s another creation—a graffiti of a women in the shutter of a building. An extensive portrait, he says, he dedicates the art to a Spanish woman who was in Cape Town learning graffiti from him.
While he has taught many, for this self-learner, he had never painted until he did his first graffiti while he was in his early teens.
“It was a lot of scribbling, messing around and writing odd things,” he says with a gentle smile on his face. ‘At that time, I was influenced by car names. But the first mural I did was a Zulu warrior on a skateboard, and it was all colored in blue,” he recalls his heydays.
“Learning in the] Street was more powerful because there weren’t much rules,” he laughs as he walks.
But painting was an expensive affair for this young artist. A can of spray cost around five Rand, which Mak1One says is seven times as high in today’s US$ exchange rate (about $4 to $5). Thus he saved, and sometimes even stole cans, to give continuity to his passion.
Growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s in the apartheid era, and especially in the Cape Flats area, where people had not much to do, Mak1One reflects that people used do graffiti to engage themselves.
“There was nothing else to do, no options or prospects,” he reminiscences of the time. “Hip hop was one way of expressing. So that’s why graffiti grew so fast in that area, and I could pick it up.”
Though his family kept young Mak1One away from politics, it somehow trickled down and reflected in his artwork.
In District 6, an area from where 60,000 inhabitants were forcibly removed by the apartheid government, his art, on an off-white wall with Signal Hill overlooking it, chronicles South Africa’s history in four decades.
The ‘60s reflect the first women’s march in Pretoria while the latter two decades portray the oppression, curfews, and riots in the country, and the ‘90s showcase the emergence of a new South Africa with Nelson Mandela ushering democracy and ending the apartheid era.
But Mak1One says he tries and refrains from painting politics. “Political slogans were right for that time. You got to find an element in time.”
And aptly, an element in time he has been able to showcase through his case. On N2 Highway that connects the CBD, his graffiti is of two hands, one opened and the other closed. The open hand has a map of the African continent with all the countries, and Mak1One says he wants to give the message of hope, solidarity and openness.
“No one paints about what the future could be,” he says of what needs to be done and what he’s doing at the moment.
But in the past decades, graffiti’s image has been tarnished by gang-related violence, and the artist says movies have played a role in reflecting the negative side of a beautiful spray art form.
“That’s not art,” he quickly remarks as he shows those graffiti from his truck’s window on the way to Woodstock, a suburb in the city that has developed itself as an artsy neighborhood.
On the same note, he further adds that graffiti doesn’t limit itself to pieces of art, murals, and as most people think, political sloganeering.
Charly’s Bakery on Canterbury Street is a fine example. The two-story building is splashed with Mak1One’s graffiti work—from the reception area to the menu and written history of the place of the working space on the second floor, they’ve all been sprayed by Mak1One.
Alexandra Biess, one of the owners of the family-run business, said that she used to “hang out with them” and watch them paint. As Mak1One used to come and buy pies and brownies at Charly’s, Biess always had an idea of making him paint after they relocated. And you see what you see, inside and out, at Charly’s today.
“I love art that everyone can see,” Biess comments of her decision.
For Mak1One too, it’s all about making his art work visible so that it can impact on people’s thinking ability and make them question on different levels.
He says he wants to “invade into people’s lives and give a message through his wall paintings.”
He once painted a Chinese proverb that says, “Nature doesn’t hurry, yet everything is accomplished,” and also musician Bob Marley’s words, “Every man thinks his burden is the heaviest” so that everyone can relate to them, be stimulated and also inspired.
“That’s what art should be—encouraging,” so says the artist who doesn’t believes in galleries and says that “streets are my gallery.”
Ricky Lee Gordon, one of the contemporary graffiti artists, and who once worked with Mak1One, also resonates the same notion when it comes to working in and with the community. “We need to address their needs [in the community] and working in the street allows you to interact with people.”
He further says, sitting in his art studio and loft, that his work has “affected my direction, personality and personal goals to be a part of a bigger community.”
And as part of making a difference at the community level, 26-year-old Gordon, along with Mak1One, is flying to Rochester, New York, to spray the walls with their artwork on anti-gun violence. Mak1One says it’s going to be the word “Believe” on a 40-meter wall.
Before this, he also flew to Greece during the 2004 Olympics where he collaborated with many international artists. He painted a mural of Mama Africa holding an atlas in her hand, a mark of brotherhood and positive spirit.
But since 2009, the City of Cape Town has imposed a ban of painting graffiti without permission in the city to make the city more clean and appealing to tourists. But artists say that the city is containing their creativity, especially when they have to seek permission to make art for the city.
Mak1One, as he drives past the city, comments that the graffiti scene has “declined in its content” as most people have been exposed and hooked to the Internet. He also expresses his dismay that artists are actually using these forums to promote themselves.
“Your street fame is going higher, but what about the community and country moving into a positive direction?” he questions.
“It’s not happening.”
As an artist, the kid from Cape Flats, now South Africa’s well-known graffiti artist says, they have a huge responsibility. And for someone who spent his childhood in a small shack with limited resources, he says he wants to make people believe in their dreams and “showcase while born in a colored community, you can still overcome the challenges and be successful.”
“I want to paint something for people and not myself,” he adds, “I want kids to say ‘I want to be an artist like that.’”
Today, after more than two decades, he is making his living—and a good one at that— through his passion and the dream he followed.
“It feels like it’s a dream and you can live your dreams,” he says with a big smile nodding his head.
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