I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it.
On the night he died - he was twenty-seven - Basquiat had been planning to see a Run-DMC show. When people asked him what his art was about, he'd hit them with the same three words: "Royalty, heroism, and the streets.
I started off as a graffiti artist in the South Bronx. My tag name was 'Loco' because I would go crazy and tag anywhere I wanted, in the weirdest places.
I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.
Street artists need to get back to actually doing things on the streets instead of in the galleries where they all seem to be ending up. I hope this term 'street artist' falls from the face of the earth, in my honest opinion.
Many people decorate their homes with designer graffiti, even though most of them would probably have real graffiti scoured off the walls of their buildings.
In certain places around the world, street art is widely accepted and it is part of the urban environment.
I have always been a Peter Blake fan and love street art and graffiti. I really like this street-art collective called Faile. They're from Brooklyn and make these prints of beautiful women.
As soon as street art got popular, I was just like, 'I'm out of here.'
I was brought up in south London and I started out in the world of graffiti when I was about 14 because I wanted to be part of that hooded tracksuit gang thing.
I'm hoping that Abu Dhabi's first piece of street art will inspire the next generation of artists the same way that the discovery of subway art inspired me all those years ago.
I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.
Street art belongs on the street. But I'm a working street artist and I earn my money selling art in the style of street art via galleries.
