PENNY

Painting on money, for me, has a parallel with painting in the street — in the minds of some it’s destroying something, ruining a perfectly decent surface, bringing down the tone of an area. For others it’s about transforming something redundant into something beautiful, or at the very least intriguing, something to start a conversation, make people stop and think for a second. I think it’s that feeling of taboo, that it isn’t legal. They both have that in common. In the same way that the street piece Beaten City was utilized as a background to give context to an image, it also inspired the image in the first place. People have a constant love/hate relationship with money; it signifies so many things about nations and their past that it’s such a rich source of inspiration for me. It’s like having walls throughout history at your fingertips, ready and waiting to be sprayed.