Artist Niels “Shoe” Meulman (NSM) has pursued many different variations of creativity throughout his life; graffiti artist, calligrapher, advertiser and gallery owner – yet it may be now, brush in hand, that he has truly found his niche.

Growing up in the Netherlands, Shoe picked up a spray can at the dawn of the graffiti era, writing his way into history. Meeting and befriending some of the greats of that early era, such as Dondi, Rammellzee and Keith Haring, he found himself in the unique position, (along with other artists at the time such as Bando and Mode2), of helping to guide the future direction and styles of graffiti across Europe, and, in turn, the world.

Moving away from graff in the 90s to pursue a career in design and typography, in 2007 Shoe unleashed unto the world a theory and movement of letter design that would set him on the path to becoming a full time artist – Calligraffiti.

A blend of intricate fonts with the aggression and raw attitude of graffiti, calligraffiti merged his love for typography and brash street aesthetics into a single entity. Lauded by older fans, and engendering a new generation of aficionados, it also eventually allowed Shoe to transition to yet another passion; painting on canvas.

Taking all that came before and pushing into themes and theories that were hitherto slightly restricted by his previous work with design, Shoes style and creative sojourn has truly come of age – he is a master in his prime at the beginning of a new, exhilarating journey.

When we caught up with Shoe before his flight down to Australia last week, we found him in the chaotic throws of preparation, readying for his frantic four week, three country “Upside Down Tour”

“I’ve just been getting ready for a thirty hour trip, its been pretty hectic,” he remarked. “I’ve never taken a trip like this –  a really, really long one, before.”

So, you’ve never been down this way before?

No, I’ve never been. Though, I’ve been in contact with Puzle for a while now, he sent me that book he did about Melbourne in the 80s -Kings Way.

I do actually get a lot of feedback from Australia about the Calligraffiti stuff.

The book itself is quite popular down here …

Well, some people say that the book is very hard to come by, others say its pretty well known, I don’t know – we’ll see.

I’m working on a new book now, however, that focuses on painting and not design, so I’m not really promoting the book this time around – more the painting work. For some people, it might be a bit of a shock that its not the same thing as Calligraffiti – there are no logos and all that stuff …

That was one of my questions actually – you’ve been focusing primarily on your painting lately, and you’ve shifted a lot away from the design aspect with your work, haven’t you?

True. I stopped working at my job in advertising and I also stopped freelancing as a graphic designer. It was a bit of a transition, once I’d decided to stop and become a full time artist, but I had to be fair to myself. If you make that choice, then you have top go all the way, and I really want to give art my all. Plus its so much fun, and its been pretty successful too.

I mean, I did a tour of China a few months ago …

I read about that …

Yeah – I also had a show in LA called “Throw Ups” where I was throwing paint at canvases, and it felt so much like me – that it just had to be like that. Just, canvases. Nice linen paintings and all that – so I found the direction I wanted to go in, and at the same time, and its becoming more abstract.

Its a lot less restrained in many ways from what you were doing before, isn’t it?

Well, I guess if you work with calligraphy, or letters and text, then of course you have to think about what text you’re going to write. Even if its just one word, just “Shoe” for example, then there has to be some meaning behind it. if you don’t have a meaning to start with it will take on a meaning, of some kind, So about two years ago I started practicing, with my hand, just the basic calligraphy stroke. Doing it over and over again. Just the repetition there has a lot of meaning in it for me, personally.

It’s the search for the perfect stroke, in a way, and stroke are sometimes like people, none of them are perfect – they’re all different ..

That sounds very Japanese/Sumi-e in nature – always looking for that perfect stroke.

Yes, it is. I didn’t really set out for it to be like that, but now that I’m really into it, it is like that. Of course, calligraphy has always had a zen like connection.

Is your art at all a meditative thing, and do you find yourself in that zone fairly often?

Well, I feel very distant from everything to do with meditation. I’m not that type at all. However, a good friend of mine, Rebecca Mendes, a designer and artists in LA … we were talking about mediation, I told her I’ve never done it in my life. She replied that I probably don’t need it, because I’m in a meditative state ten per cent of the time.

I’m the kind of person that can look out a window and be totally blank – then snap out to it. Maybe that’s my kind of meditation – that’s just a theory, really, but I like it.

For sure, each to their own – I think it comes in many different forms – I definitely think that art lends itself to those meditative states, no matter how chaotic it can often be producing it.

It may be because the actual work and act of putting the ink on the canvas doesn’t really take me that long. Most of the time the work has been done beforehand. I’ve thought about it, envisaged it, in my mind, and then I can just go ahead and put it down – and its right or wrong. I either keep it, or throw it away.

Interestingly, I read a quote from you that leads back into that, you said “the moment you write something, its already designed.”

True, true. You know what you want to achieve. There is a lot of room for impulsiveness and there is some room to move, but in a way you already have a vision in your head, you’re just trying to make it like that image. Sometimes the outcome can be even better than what you had, and that’s and that makes me really happy – sometimes you’re just like, fuck! I fucked it up! But, the more I’m doing it, the more confident I feel about letting go, that it doesn’t have to be like the picture in my mind. There’s always improvisation as well. I guess the more you become, say, like a master, the more you can play with improvisation – but I guess that goes for anything creative, whether its acting or music or whatever.

You’re in a good position though, because you’ve worked on the letterform for so long – you obvious dabbled in the painting on the side previously, but it wasn’t your primary practice …

Exactly.

That’s kind of a great thing, because you have all of that work behind you, so that you can explore something entirely new.

Right. If you work at a certain trade, graphic design, making ads, or even designing a chair, its a trade. You can try to be really good at it … but if you invent your own realm, your own rules as a artist, then its pretty easy to be the best at it in the world – as you’re the only one doing it!

[laughter]

Do you feel like you’re heading in that direction with your painting?

Of course. A lot of painters and people will say, it reminds them or this  or that painter, and I like that, because I like the tradition behind painting. Sometimes there’s a remark like “hey, its drippy” and then you’re the new Pollack, or if its calligraphic, it could resemble Japanese calligraphy. So it does tie in to certain traditions, and I guess I just named the two most important ones for me – abstract expressionism and calligraphy.

Well, you’re from a country with a very rich history of classical art – there has to be a lot of influence and ideas coming to you from that?

That’s certainly the case. It’s only recently, in the last few years, that I’ve embraced it. As I was exposed to it so much in my youth, I guess I thought it was all a bunch of crap. Maybe I was just an angry young teenager! m

My parents weren’t really taking me to museums all the time, but they were showing me things. I also had the Van Gough museum round the corner from my where I grew up … but its only recently that I’ve become interested in it all. I recently took a trip with my girlfriend Adele, who I also work with, we went to some galleries in Venice and Switzerland – it was such an eye opener. Its a great thing to help reinvent modern art, and to not look at it from a distance, but to be a part of it.

That’s something as well – we often get our fix of art from the internet, small images, and we see its in books. I guess a lot people have only seen your work like that, wider world small designs and photos, and stuff like that – it must be a nice feeling to just paint, and to have a real, painted physical representation of your work and to expose new people to it – is that where you’re at with this tour?

I really think so. In the beginning, back in my early graffiti days, there wasn’t a wall big enough – “too big a wall” just didn’t exist. The bigger the better. I still paint like that.

I’m not scared of any surface, and that’s the graffiti attitude. You attack your surface, whether its a ten meter tall wall, or whatever. I’m always looking forward to doing that. The size, the bigger the better .. but then, also, having done logos and logo types, which have to be pretty …

Concise?

Yeah. For example, designing newspaper print, or a stamp or something – there is so much detail goes in to it. So, there’s a real range between the really small and the really big, and, with my paintings, I think that those come together. I think a very big painting should also be looked at from a really short distance, just to see the detail, its really all about the detail.

You have the splashes and, maybe, the less though of happy accidents, but I do think that abstract paintings are all about the details. People always say “you have to stand back and get the whole picture”, but there’s a lot of stuff you should be looking at really close up.

Well, in one way or another you’ve been working towards all of this for over thirty years. In that time, how much of it has been right place right time, blind luck or pure chance?

That’s a really good question, actually. If I think back to how many random chances and things have helped everything to turn out this way … its really incredible. That there was a gallery, the Yaki Kornblit gallery, just around the corner from where I grew up, where I met all those early 80s New York writers. Or the fact that there was a big punk scene in Amsterdam, and people would be writing their names, up, well,the two didn’t have anything in common. I felt like writing my name on the wall, but i didn’t feel like a part of the punk movement. Then all these New York guys came along and I just realised that that’s where I wanted to be. Then to be able to go to New York and meet Dondi again … I was so lucky to be part of that world wide phenomenon.
 

Then I kind of distanced myself from it all in the 90s. I thought it was time to move away from it and move into design, and then I decided to start my own company. From there I went into advertising … until suddenly, out of the blue, I didn’t feel like doing it anymore – I just wanted to paint. So, as it turns out, I did this huge exhibition, without any funding, I put my life savings into it … and I sold everything. I thought, “fuck, this is where I want to go!”

I guess, like you … you have the website and other things. If you can be free, have your business, paint a lot, support yourself, well. That’s the dream … and some of us are living the life much more luscious than I am! I’m not selling my work for 20 grand – but hopefully I’ll get there.

Also, I have the gallery in Amsterdam, Unruly Gallery …

Did that spin off from your previous agency?

Oh, I’ve had the name for a while. I keep the name, and I then change the company! It’s also become a silk scarf brand.

Really?

Yeah, if you go on unrulygallery.com, you’ll see some art, of course, but you’ll also see some scarfs.

It’s a project I started a few years ago.

That’s an interesting one?

Of course, t-shirts are shirts – everyone does t-shirts, but I always felt like those plush silk scarves were for old ladies, you know? They were so beautifully made, Versace and Hermes and all that, but they just had such bad feel about them, and I wanted to do them differently. Now Hermes has a graffiti scarf as well – not done by me, sadly … but I’m sure they got their idea from … somewhere …

[laughter]

I have no problem with that, though, we all do it.

The gallery is in an interesting neighbourhood, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s a nice place. It used to be squatters only, junkies, but like the whole world … a bit less anarchy since the 80s, hey?

Well everything has become gentrified, but I guess that maybe the good thing is that those anarchists now probably have jobs, and get money they can use to buy the art by the same people they loved to see up on the walls.

Oh for sure, I’m not complaining, everything changes. But if you see some old photos of the chaos that the city was in back then, well, I’m sure it was the same over there – its the nostalgia of the 80s.

So, speaking of the tour, how long are you actually down here for?

Its going to be a very compressed trip. We have four cities in four weeks. I’m in Sydney first, then Melbourne for a week, Auckland for a week and then to Singapore for a week.

Then I’m off to London to present a women’s shoe that I designed with a brand called United Nude. Then, I’m back in Amsterdam for a week and then off to San Fran – I’ll be doing a show with the guys at White Walls Gallery.

You know, I feel like I’ve read so many interviews with you, and I feel like you’ve been asked so many questions before about what you’re doing, and what you’ve done – but what else are you thinking through at the moment in regards to your art?

Well, I can tell you something that’s in the process of being worked out in my head …

You’ve probably seen the repetitive strokes I’ve been doing. Well I’ve always felt that there’s something there I want to keep pushing, and trying to shape it in different ways. I guess I was right, too, because I keep doing it, and I’m getting more and more specialised in it.Then other things suddenly became important, the structure, paper, the type, the width – and, what does it stand for? it can stand for a lot of things .. but I came up with a title for it; for the blocks. They could be i’s without dots, or repetitive un’s, or just n;s … but .. I’ve named it “Justified Scripture.”

I guess it really has a double meaning. Right now I believe that whatever you read or what we see in the news, well, it could be true or not, and we don’t really know.

For me its became more and more realistic that you never actually know if something is true or not, and, that it doesn’t really matter if it is or not. If it is, like I said in another interview, with truth, also comes untruth, so there are always two sides. So, that’s the justified. It doesn’t matter what the story is – there are stories, and what’s behind those stories, often, is text. Another part, is that it is about the monks. For centuries, the Bible was the only thing that was being written …

The illuminated manuscripts – some of those are quite beautiful.

Yeah, I have nothing to do with religion, I think most of its a load of crap and i leave it alone. Yet, some beautiful things were made into the name of religion …

… and destroyed.

Yeah, that’s right. So, that’s the scripture. Usually the word “scripture” is used to describe the Holy scripture, but it also refers to the monks. I’m sure that those monks, writing away in their dark monasteries,  must have been in some kind of drug like or meditative states, and I feel connected to that. Also, the blocks, they can remind you of a cemetery or a military parade, or a bookshelf with books stacked on them. It stands for all the stories that are being told – some of them are true an some of them aren’t – you just don’t really know which is which.

Okay, it’s a bit vague maybe …

No, not really, I get it.

That’s good!

At the end of the day, all of this just proves to me that there’s really something there; something I can keep on going with for a couple of years, at least …

Check out the Calligraffiti website, the Unruly Gallery website, as well as the Calligraffiti Facebook page for more info. For dates and information as to the shows on his Upside Down tour, check here.