For the Sake of Creating

“I’m just doing my thing, having fun with it.”
Augustine Kofie

The Los Angeles artist Augustine Kofie produces images that reflect his spray can graffiti beginnings using a variety of surfaces that range from walls to canvases and clip boards.

As he explains in the video Hyper Geometry in the City “Some circles know me as a graffiti writer, some circles know me as a muralist and in some circles I’m known as a fine artist. I like to think I’m a mixed media artist, I work in multiple mediums.”

Growing up in West LA with an artist mother and not so supportive father, Kofie experimented with the art supplies he found laying around his home and by middle school he was excelling at drawing. But it was on the streets that he found his calling.

As he told Dig In magazine “I started paying attention in 1988, did my first true illegal in 1990 and started writing Kofie in 1993.”

It was there that Kofie gained his technical skills and developed his ongoing interest in construction and form, structure and balance. And his work progressed from tagging to the architectural inspired works of today they now grace not only the streets but gallery walls.

About which he told Brooklyn Street Art “I’m inspired by preliminary design, drafting, architectural renderings and pre-production concepts revolving around visual futurist design… My work and I are in constant progression. Evolution is mandatory. There is no seam that defines a beginning or ending to who I am and what I wish to produce. I do both the Graffiti and ‘art on the street’ depending on the moment and situation and especially moods. I’m a moody cat and I tend to gravitate to what I want to do to ease my restlessness. 

A subject Kofie elaborated about with the Wide Walls Magazine stating “Evolution is a strange notion, even stranger when you have the chance to see it occur over the years within your own styles. Letters forms are still prevalent in the works, but not as literally for many reasons. I’m interested in how shapes and forms can and play off one another and interact, not what it says nor spells out… As the years go, I begin to understand the bigger picture in my works. I am fully aware that I am interested in the process of creating more than the final result. I create for the sake of creating, so when these works give an advanced impression from previous collections, then I am in truly coming into focus. In tune. The works are truly taking shape and becoming their own.”

A selection of Kofie’s studio works will be on show at New York’s Jonathan LeVine Gallery’s exhibition Inventory from the 21^st of November to the 19^th of December.