Arend Maatkamp

With graffiti the story starts in 1996 when, after visiting an architectural exposition on the south side of Rotterdam city, my dad went to take some photo’s at a nearby graffiti wall, the beauty of it all hit me head-on.
Being a somewhat quiet boy I found, shortly after entering puberty, a good way of expressing myself in sketching, after 2 years I decided to hit the streets with a friend of mine and we did some daylight vadalism. It was fun but it wasn’t more than just kids having fun, throughout the following years we went out doing damage without a cause. In 2000 I ended up hanging with some people that where deeper into the scene, they showed me how it was really done and things started progressing a lot quicker and soon after that I did my first piece. Around that same time I started exploring the world of (web)design and I started photographing graffiti. In the year that followed I found myself a name that represented me and where I come from. Joax.
Skills were progressing at a steady pace and I started to wonder.. “What makes me unique as an artist?”, “Why am I doing all this” and “Where did this culture come from”.
So I started digging into the past and with the new-gained knowledge sort of started all over again. Soon after that my own sense of direction in style was born and it started to get somewhat more serious.
The years that followed where quite turbulent. Jesus came into my life and as one might expect this changed quite a bit. A whole new light was now shining on creativity and vandalism. I ended up with an Christ following graffiti collective (ggcrew.com) and left the illegal behind in my former life.
My recent activities are documented on my website joax.nl and my flickr page.