Raheem's Revenge (but wait...there's more!)

Raheem's Revenge (12x16inch, acrylic & aerosol, 2011)

Greetings! Life is good lately, I've been blessed with lots of fun work so far this summer, and I feel like every time I turn around a dope new project comes up or I find some new inspiration. Currently I'm prepping for a mural in an office, another one in a bar, and have a few more projects set up for August. The piece above, Raheem's Revenge, was a quick piece I created because after watching Do The Right Thing I kept wanting Radio Raheem to get some kind of revenge on the cops that killed him. If you've seen the movie, which is a Spike Lee classic, you'll remember Radio Raheem - he was the character that walked around playing Public Enemy on full blast from a mega boombox, dominating the soundscape wherever he went with hard Chuck D anthems. In the end (*spoiler*) he goes into the pizza joint as part of an impromptu protest and ends up getting his fly boombox smashed by Sal, the owner, for playing it too loud. He flips out and starts choking Sal out, which ends up in a brawl in the streets, promptly attended by the cops. It takes about four cops to pull Raheem off Sal, and they start choking him with a police baton. One particularly enthusiastic cop keeps choking him, lifting his feet off the ground, and when his dead body drops to the ground a little later, the cops freak out, drag his body into a cop car, and flee the scene. The situation rapidly escalates into a full scale riot, and Sal's pizza joint is burned beyond recognition. I figured that the best way for Raheem to get his revenge was to walk around the city, invincible, blasting his boombox and laughing at the cops as their batons bounced off of his iron armour.

Photo Credit: A.P. Louden

This was a quick piece I did on some found wood in my hometown of Calgary. I was chillin' with my brother, and my game must be slippin' because he took all these photos without me noticing a thing...Whattup Anton! We had a couple hours to kill, so we grabbed some cheap hardware store spraypaint and I dropped a lil freestyle piece.

Here's a quick shot of another piece I started on that day using some leftover dried up craft acrylics and some more found wood - I'll tell you more about it when it's finished! The title is Usher of Apocalypse. I used some automotive paint for the background which ended up staining the raw wood in a really interesting way...