Your train. Your tag. Your canvas.

Queens, 1983. I rode the trains to a messenger job, and I looked at everything: the ads, the chalk drawings, the tags and the pieces rolling by. I did not always know what to call what I was seeing. Sometimes I wondered where vandalism ended and art began. But I was drawn to it. I never picked up a can.

Four decades later I finally built the studio. What changed wasn’t me — it was the tools. They got good enough that I could make what I’d been picturing all along. But technology doesn’t know the history. It can give you the look; it can’t give you the reason. What makes this real is the city: the people, the writers who built the language, the historians, the collectors. Original, legal work made in their honor. No borrowed history, no pretending.