The rebellious and unruly nature is what attracted me to Graffiti

Sket185NDSMAmsterdam2023-006

I was born and raised in Middelburg, Zeeland. My parents divorced when I was 9 years old. I followed my mother to the east of the country and ended up in Almelo. After seeing the film Style Wars on TV, I started spraying graffiti in 1984 together with a friend who was originally from Amsterdam. My first 'tag names' were BASIC, JEL and SET. In 1988 I was arrested with the name SET while spraying graffiti on a train in the Enschede yard. After that I tried to stop graffiti, but
I didn't really succeed.

I have always been good at drawing, and I was also interested in technology. I found a nice link between the two in photography. In 1991 I registered with various arts
Academies including KASKA, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. I was accepted everywhere so I had a choice. And that with almost exclusively work based on graffiti. Ultimately I chose KASKA and moved to Antwerp in 1992. That's where I started studying photography. It offered me the ultimate combination between technology and image.
(photo on the left: Me 1987)

I decided to move to The Hague in 1995. There I became friends with NOBL from the KN crew (Killer Nights) and Kers now SREK . In 1996, after a night out, I created my first Whole Car, PORNSTARS, with SREK from Delft and DUBS from Rotterdam. This was also the beginning for the BTP crew. Our idea was to make pieces on trains around the theme of 'Porn'. Other crews went on the warpath mainly at night. The BTP was the first Dutch train crew that did almost all actions during the day. Usually on Sunday afternoon, wearing those yellow vests, in our regular 'yard' at The Hague Hollands Spoor. In the graffiti film 'Image Movers' from 1997 you can see a lot of our daily actions. For us it was mainly about the action and having fun together. What we made, and under what name, was less important to us.

There was a period when I wrote a different name every week. Usually because I was arrested and forced to choose a different name. In the 1990s, the Railway Police photographed and documented all graffiti on trains. They knew exactly who had done what. Often there was a whole file ready at the police station when they went to interrogate you. At a certain point I got tired of trains and started focusing more on making 'wild style pieces' at a 'Hall of Fame'. In 2006 I started working under the name SKET185. The Irene Tunnel H.O.F. Delft has been my regular hangout for a long time, here I have created a lot. In 2009 I moved to Amsterdam.