| Rick Shipley has been an aerosol artist for 20 years, creating bold graphic designs which can be spotted on walls around Leeds and Bradford. Since the age of thirteen, when he came up with the pseudonym ‘Cage One’, Rick has been producing works of art.
He has moved from bold lettering to colourful characters, mostly of people he knows, and some of which grace the ‘legal’ walls in Leeds’ Hyde Park. He began a foundation art course but never finished, finding that he was looked down on by his teachers as a graffiti artist.
However, in recent years, ‘graffiti’ has become recognized as a genuine art form; it has helped to move art out of the gallery and onto the street, where, as Rick tells The Hype, “everyone can see and enjoy it – that’s why I like doing it.”
Rick has been selling his work for the last ten years, and has built up an online website on which he displays and sells his large canvases, a mixture of sharp blocks of colour and the softer contours of female faces. He also creates designs to order, either on canvases or straight onto walls.
As well as producing aerosol artworks, Rick does a lot of community projects, working with young people at the Young Offenders Institute in North Allerton.
He also collects works from other street artists, and has recently started experimenting with other media, “I’ve just started doing lino printing – I want to get my head around that next.”
To see some or Rick’s work, visit: www.cageone.co.uk
A display of Rick’s canvases will be going up in December at BRB in Leeds.
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