“Ignorant Fear” – A Chat With NYC Graffiti Artist OZBE

When it comes to New York City Graffiti the streets serve as an endless canvas for many different writers that emerged from all over the world. Recently we met up with a very talented graff writer that goes by “0283″ to bystanders, but to his friends and fellow graffiti artists he’s known as OZBE. We asked OZBE about how he fully started writing, bombing and his passion for graffiti. OZBE  started fully living the graffiti lifestyle in ’01 doing a lot of tags in blackbooks and bombing local areas. He got his name from the classic American fiction movie The Wizard of Oz, but another writer already took the name “Oz” so he tried messing around with other titles and came up OZBE.

OZBE hit the streets hard in 2002, and during ’04 he started being recognized for destroying a lot of areas along the 6 train line with about eighty or more tags that you can still see til this day. That was his notorious era. We asked OZBE what makes him keep doing it and the reason behind his spree he told us, “I was stress with life and became raged so the art was my drug to escape” . When OZBE first started out he wasn’t with a crew, he preferred to do his bombing by himself with no look out. He told us, “when you look out for yourself you don’t have to rely on anyone else to help you out. But I may roll  with my crew just for certain spots. “

When OZBE started getting heavy with bombing he was trying to figure out how he can get the average viewer to relate or read his tags,  so he started to convert his letters into numbers, 0283. He told us its easier for the average person to read the \numbers than letters. The messages he tries to get out for people is: just be yourself do whatever makes you happy.

Every time he bombs because he eats, it gets his name out there to the masses of the world OZBE explains. Its a personal ad for his work and his lifestyle, not justifying to bomb but taking a risk to try to survive in this world.

Words by Zo Magic

Head over to our tumblr for more flicks of OZBE’s graffiti.