JPS spoke with Bored Panda. He said, “I was always into art from a young age. But I grew up in an environment that seemed to hold little opportunity. Then a series of events and the murders of 2 close friends sent me down a twelve-year path of heavy drink and drug use.
“This all changed in 2009 when my mate George took me to the Banksy museum show. It was a major wake-up call to how I had thrown my talents away. I loved the concept of using full-size stencils on walls. It planted the seed to face my addictions and I began self-teaching and hitting walls.””
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He also said, “I was born and raised in Weston-super-Mare. This was predominantly my hometown until 2016 when I met a German street artist named PZY. I then moved to lower Franconia and we got married in 2018. She has taken more of a back seat with her street art these days and is more of my manager and assistant. It’s a tough, high-pressure game if you take it on a serious level and many street artists don’t last the long haul, sadly. The environment I live in now is incredibly different from the world I came from. I have to keep my mind in a state of trying to forget whilst trying to remember the lessons at the same time. Before 2016, my recovery was far from a straight line because drugs seemed unavoidable. Out here, that temptation is removed massively, although it had the downside of being tougher art-wise. Police are faster than GTA out here and people aren’t used to seeing people paint the new surroundings, which also inspired other types of work from me.”