Where did you actually grow up ?
I was born in the 80s and grew up in the Ruhr area, but I moved to Niedersachsen, when I was 7 years old. However, I have always kept a strong attachment to the Ruhr area, and later moved back there for a short time.
Did you draw or paint as a child?
Only a little. I hated art lessons at school….
Are there any artists in your family?
No.
How and when did you discover graffiti/style writing?
When I was 15, in the middle of puberty. End of the 90s. In Osnabrück. Then tagged myself in the early 2000s. At that time German rap was big and my friends at school had music albums etc.. The internet took off, I remember forums with pictures of graffiti. There was even a little shop in Osnabrück, with cans, markers, magazines and records. I bought Backspin magazines and drew off styles at first, then sketched.
With what name?
Already with LORIO, but without a t. At first, I only did tags. And nobody had that name.
Did you already know Loriot’s films and drawings?
Yes, but at first only the films, which we watched at home at Christmas and which amused us and me very much. West German cultural heritage somehow.
And when did you start being more active outdoors ? And where?
When I was 17/18 I met new people, we formed crews and did bombings. On the motorway, on noise barriers, on fright trains and street bombings. There was a trashy yard where they painted old Regio trains. There were also a few legal walls. I also used other names like Elite, Rain…It was very intense for about a year, with problems then. With house searches at the parents’ etc. Then I took a break for a while. After an apprenticeship, I went to Bochum at 23, back to the Ruhr area, and studied, but nothing related to art.
Did you continue painting then?
Yes, at that time I tried my hand at painting. I was doing characters, wanted to get away from letters.
Are there any style writers or character painters that inspired or coined you?
I was not directly coined, but I really liked the work of JIM 129. It is not a Berliner, but a German. I celebrated his style. But that was so long time ago…
When did you move to Berlin?
My brother lived here, I was a frequent visitor in the early 2000s. It was near Beusselstraße by the S-Bahn. And I was totally flashed, there was so much graffiti. I moved here at the beginning of 2008. Street art was already everywhere, too, and especially works on paper. I discovered works by Sam Crew, the Wurstbande, figurative things, they inspired me. So I was also doing paste ups for a while, drawing with pen and ink, trying stencils, painting geometric characters, experimenting a lot, but I didn’t have a good technique…and I would say I’m not a good character painter.
When did you start painting figuration on walls?
Around 2010…on halls and in lost places, in the Lichtenberg brewery, for example.
So letters came into play again, but I found the classic 3D block style I was trying out boring and started to abstract the letters. Often I painted the same style for two months and then painted differently again. At some point I discovered the box shape, so I created a frame to embed letters in and abstracted them. I wasn’t good with colours, so I always put together a 6-can combination to get more of a feeling for combining colours. In the box I draw the outlines of the letters, but then I think in surface and shape, trying to combine them so that they are just surfaces and then fill them in with colours. The most beautiful thing is to have the outline and then fill the areas. To be in the flow. And to work rather unplanned here. It has a meditative character, I really feel being in the moment. In the styles between 2013 and 2019 I also integrated classic elements of style writing like arrows, dots, patterns, with bright colours. Sometimes I integrated characters.
How long have you been painting and integrating Loriot’s bulbous-nosed man?
I think about five years ago. I started to put the Loriot figure in black and white over the piece like a drawing at the end, as a contrast to the colourful piece in the background.
I didn’t know Loriot’s illustrations as a teenager, I bought books later. His illustrations have a timeless humour somehow. And the drawings are relatively simple. He was an all-rounder, had a great influence, and for me, it’s like a homage to him.
What technique do you use on walls? Do you make sketches beforehand?
Sometimes I just do brush paintings with wall paint or just use spray , or I mix, depending on the phase. And I always work with sketches. I do about 3 to 6 sketches a week and paint outside about once a week. At different halls in Berlin or in lost places in the surrounding area.
Do you paint these Loriot figures freely and invent them in other positions, or do you adopt them from his illustrations?
I always take individual elements from Loriot’s drawings in his books. Sometimes I put them in a different position. I photograph figures from his books beforehand and then decide on the wall, after I’ve painted the colourful pieces, which figure I’ll put on top. Depending on the piece I have painted, I decide by feeling which figure I want to put over it from my photo archive, which one I want to repaint, and then paint it in large from the mobile phone with a can for the lines and fill it with paint.
But what names/letters do you use for these pieces? It doesn’t always say LORIO, I read something else there (even if it’s hard to decipher), right?
Yes, there is always a different word. I’m in one of those sketch battle groups, on Telegram and Signal, for example, where a new word is dropped every day for spontaneous sketching. One word-one sketch. That’s where some of the words in my pieces come from. But I don’t care about the word, it’s about finding different forms through the different letters of the alphabet. And occasionally there’s again a Lorio in it.
And how did you come up with your funny name ichbin3oeltanks?
I read the name at a friend’s, thought it was great, and then changed the number.
Thank you for your time and this conversation!
By Katia Hermann, July 2023
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