Monday 20 July 2020

Re design and re birth. Rewind and recycle.

Today the skuzzabot logo is being re designed by a proper graphic designer.  I’m sitting up on top of Aro valley in Wellington NZ.  The afternoon sky is clearing after a morning of rain and bird song is rising.  I’m in the comfy lounge of my Airbnb drinking Shizuoka green tea while keeping to the wifi signal in case my designer needs direction.  Skuzzabot standing by.  The original logo came from a comical drawing that one of my graffiti mentors called STELTH designed.  In 1998 I told him about a character that I was imagining and as a joke he drew how he imagined it.  I took it from there and applied my basic graphic design skills to make the circle stamp logo.  Trying to emulate the Japanese family crest.  It had a scattering of production from graff jams at UVIC, graphic tshirts and bags, homemade art books and murals etc.  I even made clay sculptures of Skuzza.  In 2018 I published a book of Hanz Fear’s art under the Skuzzabot label and 2019 a book about my Japanese inspired art.  I decided to keep pushing it and tried my luck with Chinese manufacturing through alibaba.  I had varied success with the hats, bags, patches, stickers, pins and scarves that I ordered.  Using Instagram I mailed promo packs to my followers and supporters with the request of subscribing to my YouTube channel.  All went well until COVID-19 hit with an uncanny similarity to the shape of my logo.  Circles and cones.  People even asked if skuzzabot was a covid.  I even wondered if my logo was a self inflicted virus destined to destroy me.  I temporarily used the shodo version of Skuzzabot which is based on the ensho zen circle and inspired by kanji.  Finally today begins the re design and re launch of my symbol which represents making art from anything, especially garbage.  This is the way of skuzzabot, to continually recreate out of the wreckage.