PIECE MAGAZINE: Silver & True Blue Battle

Janurary 19, 2013 L.A. witnessed it's top 16 graffiti writers battle it out. The challenge: use only the colors silver, true blue and one other color the writer chooses. The prize: $1,000.00, high fives and the chance to walk away feelin' like a graff god. Now you may ask who is the Don King behind all of this? Has this person been writing for a long time? Are they from a reputable crew? Yes, yes and yes! Besk (LOD,UCA) has been putting in work since'85.

BESK

"Im a true believer that Graff is and has always been about letters and I think we've lost A LOT of what Graffiti is, it’s turned really artsy and a ton of color on top of color and huge backgrounds, where at times the letters are not even the main focus, but only an afterthought. We’ve lost a lot of the letter structure that was necessary when I started painting, so I wanted to do a battle where you had to come with dope letter structure or go home. No hiding behind colors or characters; just letters."

In order to get into the battle don't start doing your Rocky training just yet. With help from local crews, the writers and judges are chosen in the city where the battle will take place. "We want to set it up to where it's going to be the same in every city that we go to. So it's 10 writers and 3 judges in every city. Each battle is going to look the same. Except L.A., in L.A. we got a little carried away and had 16 artists."[laughs] To be a judge the criteria is a little different."We try to find guys that we think are not going to be biased. In the graffiti community everybody knows everybody. We try to find guys that we think are going to be unbiased and are going to be able to judge something regardless of who they're friends with. People that we think have good integrity." The judges look for style, technique, originality and use of space. The winner of the Los Angels battle, Aloy (MSK/SKA) upheld all these prerequisites knocking out 15 other contenders.

ALOY

Besk has a goal of taking the battle nationwide. He is well on his way with battle number 2 being held in San Diego on May 11th, 2013. "We are going to be doing a San Francisco battle in a few months. Then after we have the Frisco battle, we're going to have Aloy, whoever wins the San Diego battle and the winner of the San Francisco battle duke it out in L.A. to see who is the king of the Silver & True Blue style in Cali." Each battle also includes a family friendly environment, vendors, music, raffles, giveaways, food and you can watch it live streaming around the world via the internet.

Thanks to all the artists, the judges, EVERYONE at INKSTAINZ for all your support, Montana USA, Huskey Radio for all the help,the Tee Shirt Spot for always being there,Threat HEM for being my eyes and ears in SD,Streetwisegear.com, Dyseone.com for coming thru strong, my family and my LOD"UCA crews for all the strenght you guys give me. Be on the look out for our new venture, TrueGraff.com coming to a wall near you. See you all in San Diego May 11th. -Besk

We got to sit down with the boys for some pre-gaming.