ELSE MSK ICR
He was arrested many times; has been in jail twice for over five years at maximum control lockdown prisons of California; he was shot at, stabbed, and beat down by cops; he has run across freeways chased by helicopters and jumped off rooftops. Then graffiti changed his life. Now Elser of Mad King Society, ICR and The 7th Letter graffiti crews is one of the very few graff artists commissioned by Los Angeles Mayor, and doing work for clients like Disney and Etnies. He paints large scale murals all over the world and works on numerous projects for clothing and skateboarding companies. But his feet still stay strongly rooted in the streets, because that’s where it all started for him and for graffiti.
interview by Katya Guseva
…In one of the interviews you mentioned graffitti saved your life. Can you elaborate on that?
I know graffiti saved my life. I saw that on a sticker VYAL gave to me that he made, and it really sunk in on me. I had a long gangbanging career, and an active gang and prison life. I loved the gang life, couldn’t get enough. I wasn’t willing to stop until I was one of the worst of the worst. I’m sure I had terrible self-destructive things going on inside of me. When I turned 18 I went of to LA county jail, then on to years of prison. I went to five different prisons. In my first term I joined a prison gang, because that’s what I knew and liked and could strive and excel in. I was good at hurting people and myself.
The further I got in, the harder I pushed to run myself into the ground and try and ground myself and everyone around me down, the more I lost touch with the person I was growing up. I lost touch with being the kid that liked art and got into graffiti, the kid that liked to figure things out, to read, and so forth.
Years went by. I did more gangbanging on the streets, I went back to prison, it was a vicious cycle. I would see old writers that remembered me and they would trip out on how deep I had gotten into the Life. My crew ICR always kept strong gang ties, so all of us were wrapped up one way or another. There were so many crazy nights, crazy fights, crazy shootings, it took its toll on us all.
In 2002 my friend and one of the two leaders of ICR, Pure passed away, and it really hit me. I felt unsure of my footing in life. At the funeral Pure’s mother cried and told me that when we were kids and always at the house, that she remembered those as the good times in Pure’s life. It reminded me of the movie and book The Outsiders, when they say to Ponyboy: “Stay gold.” I felt like graffiti is what brought my friends and myself together for the golden time in our lives. After that I started painting again and it reconnected me to my past self. It was as if it reawakened the part of myself that was gone or asleep. It made me realize that there have to be kids like I was out there − confused, angry, feeling like they don’t fit in or have nowhere to go. A lot of these type of kids end up in graffiti. So it made me realize: maybe I can help these kids, maybe I can save these kids from going through what I went through. Because a lot of it I barely survived, and maybe these kids aren’t as strong and need to be shown how to change to keep them alive…
