Upclose with Flying Fortress
Flying Fortress is an internationally touring street artist, from Germany, who hits up art jaunts with stickers, posters and traditional graffiti. He got his start tagging in 1989 but quit in ’95 when he saw the scene getting stale. After studying graphic design, he went back to bombing the streets with his trademark characters, the Teddy Troops.
HK Magazine: How does a graffiti artist go from zero to hero?
Flying Fortress: I started to blitz my local city with stickers and posters. This was before everybody started to do it and soon people recognized these new, unfamiliar things on the streets. So my friends and I had an interview in a big daily paper. Next day, the police called up the reporter to get our names. However, we’d opened the way for other artists and soon hundreds of new stickers started to show up in the streets. Now it’s a mass phenomenon. Since then, in my home city I don’t do stickers anymore, keeping away the heat. But I travel to other cities often...
HK: Why did you come back to street art, after everything else you’ve done?
FF: When I came back to graffiti/street art, I wanted to take it one step forward. It is all still about the old game, “Hello, I was here!” However, in the classic graffiti movement, it was about having a “tag.” A tag is encrypted code readable by those in the secret scene only. People on the streets can’t decode those tags. For them, the tags are all the same – it’s just “vandalism.” So, my idea was to get something out there that was visual like a brand icon. That way people know it’s something new. Maybe they still don’t know what it is all about but they do recognize it as something special.
HK: Why, why, and why?
FF: My main drive in continuing to create the Troops is to bring myself to the edge and far over it. I mean, I could draw other characters every single day but those characters would lack soul. As an artist you should force yourself to go further even if it hurts (like getting bored of my character). Otherwise you just defeat your own status quo.
HK: What’s your style?
FF: I always use bold outlines and a limited array of colors. I use only four to five colors to make it a strong graphic. Also, I always use white as a main color. White gives room for evolution of the other colors.
HK: What do you see ahead in street art?
FF: Nowadays everything on MTV looks like street art. It has become a permanent sector in graphic design. I think it has also become a subject in design schools. There has never been an underground movement that has had its blood sucked out so fast by the commercial industry as street art has. There are still a lot of new things going on but you have to look deep to find them. Myself, I started to work more in other mediums. Anything that grabs my attention. The next trend is already on and it is about characters and their stories in the urban world.
HK: Last words of advice?
FF: Keep your eyes open. See your surroundings but also see inside yourself to find your very own way. And kids! Don’t do drugs and ringtones!