The Swedish fine artist, illustrator, and mural artist, Ekta, was interviewed by Juxtapoz magazine. Among other things, he talks about his background, his discovery of art, his name, his works, and why he doesn’t do outside work at the moment. It’s a great interview!
Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got started?
I was born in 1978 in a small coastal town in the south of Sweden. When I was 18 I moved to London with my best friend to skate and ended up staying there for 9 years. Art came through skateboarding and somewhere around the millennium painting and drawing became more important to me than skating. Some early influences in art were people like Mark Gonzales and Neil Blender. In 2005 my personal life was not so good and not having money to pay the expensive London bills, I decided to try my luck back in Sweden and moved to Gothenburg, where I’ve been since.
Where did that name EKTA come from?
It’s just a name that I chose from my very brief flirt with graffiti in the late 1990s. The downside to using a pseudonym is the constant association with graff, I don’t consider myself to be part of that scene but I do have a fairly big interest in tags.
How do you plan a wall or piece, what’s your method?
I usually start with a very vague idea or no idea at all as to what I’m painting or drawing, I make stuff up as I go along, it would bore me to death to have a fixed idea that just needs to be realized. I don’t like to be obvious with my work and I don’t want it to be too vague either, in between is good. There’s a lot of lines involved in my drawings but I tend to stay away from lines completely when I paint and just use blocks and shapes of color, it’s a good way for me to not get bored the process. I prefer painting but when I’ve done that for a while it’s good to swap to lines and drawing for a bit. For painting I use acrylics and spray paint, I usually don’t mix the two (unless sometimes when painting outdoors) as for drawing its just pens. I don’t have a standard or some specific brand or size that I always use, I recently started drawing a bit more with a brush and ink which is something I’ll continue with for sure, I’ve been very focused on tidy & clean lines when I’m drawing and using a brush allows me to try and be a bit less “perfect.”
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