‘Rebel’ or “RBL” started his graffiti adventure getting interested in stencils with political slogans and messages. He thought it was a cool and interesting way to get some messages out on the streets and make people think more outside the box. Stenciling was just going to be a fun hobby on the side. Before starting to spray the streets, he had seen many documentaries about graffiti and urban art. Documentaries like Style Wars, Bomb It, Infamy and others really gave him inspiration and motivation to try this stuff himself.

He then figured he needed a tag to go with his stencils. It took him a few weeks of pondering, writing down different names, never finding the name that he really liked. Then he thought of a word that describes him and his actions; ‘Rebel’, which also could be shortened down to ‘RBL’. So for example that he could write ‘RBL’ when hiting spots that had to be done quick, and ‘Rebel’ where time was more available. Thats when things started to get crazy, he got hooked and really fell in love with graffiti.

Things started going really fast by this point, with him and his friend ‘Mask’. They basically breathed graffiti in this first year or so, thats pretty much all they would think about after coming home from work. They would sit together listening to music and just sketch, sketch, sketch; bouncing ideas of each other, motivating and inspiring each other to get better. They where feed up with the whole system, had energy and wanted to bomb (paint) everything. There were so many clean walls and nobody was doing it at that point, so they thought, why not give it a shot?

Since they only had sprayed for a couple of months they did’nt really have any skills. But they had the passion to bomb and never stopped painting. They would go out at almost every possible oppertunity to paint, late at night, no matter the weather; rain, wind or snow. Often out until sunrise, enjoying one last cigarette before crawling to bed totally exhausted. And before you knew it, they really started to progress with some interesting tags and pieces across town.

Eventually after about a year or so they got busted (super unlucky) by the cops. By now they had bombed the whole city. Tags and pieces where everywhere across town. After they got caught, they both had a long break. ‘Rebel’ started doing some legal pieces. Finding it wierd to stand there with all the time in the world, people around watching him while painting asking “Are you RBL?” all the time. Pretty fucking annoying and boring he thought; legal painting wasnt the same.

Lately ‘Rebel’ has started to make graffiti on canvas. Combining the abstract, dirty, grungy and rugged, with the nice and clean is something he really enjoys. And thats kind of what he tries to reflect in his work, basically trying to capture the atmosphere of street graffiti in a single picture, canvas or wall.