Winston the Whale works in pure color. Crisp lines, rounded edges, flat saturated fields: prismatic mouths, starry-eyed bats, grids, squiggles, vines and butterflies, with a 1960s, Scandinavian-folk and Memphis-design accent.
I just really love colors.
He started writing graffiti at twelve and put up stickers across Portland: a clown, an owl and a blob. The blob became the whale. Then he found the tattoo needle and, in his words, “immediately got hooked.” He went viral in 2016 for red-and-blue 3D tattoos that pop when you look through anaglyph glasses, and he still makes them. His home is a Space Age time capsule.
For Walls Within he took his palette to wall scale, in a piece about the flow between humans, nature and technology. It is a white wall of rainbow circuitry: an open hand with an eye, rainbows pouring from heads, diamonds, drips and color-coded lines like a transit map. Walls Within, curated with Portland Street Art Alliance, at Hopscotch Portland.
