ZOOM on the creative process of Bom K
Can you remind us who you are and your artistic practice?
I call myself Bom K, painter and member of the group “Da mental vaporz”. I began my first graffiti at the age of 17 years under several pseudonyms before opting definitively for this one in 1995. Today I paint on walls and canvases in my studio, I live from this passion full time.
What is your background, how did you start creating?
I quickly found an interest in drawing for the pleasure of creating, from a very young age. At the beginning, I was content to reproduce animals from magazines and books, this allowed me to approach the pencil and understand the steps. Also, my mother painted from time to time and reinforced my taste for drawing. I did not have access to art schools because I had to work to help pay the bills, I naturally had the desire to pursue drawing and then my first paintings on canvas as a self-taught, while documenting myself.
In your daily work as an artist, what inspires you? What is the trigger for the creation of a work?
Sometimes I look into the void to see an idea, a concept, emerge. Then, putting this idea down on paper to get as close as possible to it requires a process that leads more or less to the construction of what I want. Most of the time, I come back to notes or small sketches that accumulate over time, then while drawing something else comes to mind. It’s like a never-ending rotation that leads me on other tracks. It seems simple to write it down but it’s often a little battle with the imagination.
Can you explain us the way you build a work? What are the different stages of creation?
Generally, I build a work beforehand with a drawing work in order to prepare my subject. Then follows a succession of stages among which, the flat areas and the shaping via the tracings will form the whole motif and the background. From then on, I can begin to work on the volume and the detail by alternating with the different ways of obtaining them. The mastery of the tool is essential, it allows me the ease to take back my mistakes or to modify at will.