Hello qWeRT, could you introduce yourself?
Haliho! Csabi vagyok! 😛 I am Csaba, a street artist known as qWeRT.
A 40-year-old Hungarian. I lived more than a decade in the UK – mainly in London – and now I am living in Barcelona… I was also living in China, Indonesia, and Rio de Janeiro a bit.
So I would rather say I am Hungarian by blood but European by spirit!
27 years ago or so, I tasted graffiti. I did my first stickers like 18-19-20 years ago. But I really clicked on street art like 11-12 years ago when I moved to London. It was love at first sight, and I am still in love… It’s been a while that I have been trying to live off my art, but it’s super hard.
So when I am short, I have to work. Mainly as an abseiler…
Apart from this, I am an experienced addict traveller, who must try and discover all sorts of things by himself. I also love music, dancing, hitchhiking, hiking, risking my life in general, doing sports, and doing all kinds of weird and extreme shit…
Also, now I am a proud father of a 1-year-old! His name is Bence! 🙂
Is your artist name inspired by the QWERTY keyboard?
Yes.
I was creating for a while without a name, but people constantly told me that if I want to take street art seriously, I have to have one – and an Instagram profile too – so I choose to be ?! But! Insta didn’t let me use it because of the special characters. So I tried to find a name, but they were all occupied…
I kept trying until I felt how pathetic and fucked up it was that my name was going to be the one that an application allowed. So I said, FUCK IT! Let’s just use some random letters; it doesn’t matter, so I typed Q-W-E-R-T…
Could you tell us about your journey as an artist?
It was very long! And I am still tripping! :p I have been doing street art longer than I have been doing anything else in my life… Living in a certain place or being in a certain relationship included…
Art was definitely the most important part of my life until my son was born.
As I said, it was love at first sight. At the beginning – in the first 1-2-3-4 years – I was painting like crazy 20-30-40-50 hours a week, like there was no tomorrow, and I was getting better and better. It was pretty straightforward! A shitload of jobs, which was bringing the results…
I remember how things were different at the beginning when I was limited in skills, and mainly passion drove me. I seriously had to think and try different techniques and different perspectives to reach what I want and destroy the barriers one by one. And the joy when I did it?! I would say it was a hard period, but actually I loved what I was doing, and I always felt CLEARLY that this is just the beginning.
I looked back, and I saw the progress I made. Then I closed my eyes and imagined the future pieces, and that gave me a lot of strength.
Later, I started to give up things for my art, and slowly it started to pay me back… I started to sell, I entered my first gallery, and so on…
Now I feel there are no technical limits anymore. I am full of ideas, and I feel I could do anything I want, but honestly, I feel a little bit bored and tired of trying to make a living out of it…
But it’s natural! Life is like this! There are ups and downs…
Do you remember what your very first piece of street art was?
I have 2 pieces in my mind. Not sure which one I did first, but I guess it was a bunch of stickers I made for Barcelona…
Actually, it was a very good idea! I created different characters, and I wrote a background story for them too. The plan was travelling around the world, putting these stickers up with new and returning characters, and writing a crazy intergalactic story, with parties, crimes, culture, drama, love, adventures, craziness, and so on… Then I realized that if I put up the same static stickers 3-4-5-6-x times, it will be unbalanced with the crazy vivid story, so I stopped after my second trip…
Your characters are very easily recognizable with their big black eyes.What was the inspiration behind this figure, and how did it evolve into your trademark?
I drew my first character like 20 years ago in a school book, during a boring grammar lesson. At that time I was drawing these kinds of weird creatures, which was about to express that I am weird too…
Then I completely forget about it, and 5-6-7 years need to pass by for me to put it up on a wall as one of my first street piece.
Later I was creating in several different styles, and this little fella wasn’t even my favorite, but with the years it developed, and I left all the rest behind. For me it was crystal clear that a good street artist always needs to do the same thing, but he also always needs to do something different, and with this character this is exactly what I was and what I am doing!
At first I was replacing the higher human authorities and their symbols with love, with a heart, but later I found it too cheesy, and I wanted to add a deeper – a way deeper – meaning. People didn’t get or didn’t want to get the message, so I didn’t force it…
I created some pieces reflecting on the problems of the society too, and then I was playing more with the visual aspects, with the colors, with the shapes, with the techniques, and with the materials I use. I started to do studio pieces, I created my own backgrounds, and I even started to build my own frames. If I had a new idea, I didn’t hesitate a lot; I just did it without thinking too much about the concept. That was maybe a mistake!
Now I feel my characters are awesome, but by not having a clear concept, I am losing a lot. I feel they are everywhere, and they are everything without a clear identity, but I am about to change that. I started to write a background story. A story about their origins, about their life on earth, about their personality, their development, and in some cases their regression… It’s a long way to go, but with finishing the story, I hope I can create a whole, well-connected universe…
Could you describe your creative process? How would you define your artistic style?
The process starts with an idea that I already have enough for more than the rest of my life, so I don’t think too much! Not anymore! I just pick one out of the hundreds that I “feel” the most, and I start drawing with a pencil.
Then I cut the stencil, then I spray the stencil layers, then I apply my strong black outline, and then I cut it around.
With the street pieces, it is very important to find a good place. That adds a lot.
For the first 1-2 pieces of a new design, it can take days, or maybe even weeks, to find the right place… Later, I pay less attention, but still! Placement is really important for me!
About the studio pieces… It’s way more fun to create them, considering that I do the background and the framing too. Also, here I experience a lot. It’s awesome to do street pieces, but I can find way more freedom and creativity in my studio pieces.
I used to listen to a lot of music, I was dancing, and I painted 14 -16-18 hours in a row, completely losing myself in the creative process, sometimes doing it for days and days, not leaving the house for a week. I was living in my studio, so it was a lot of fun, but in the last 3 years I was living with my girlfriend in a completely normal apartment, so I was losing more and more space…
And now with my son, I guess with him it’s official! I have no studio anymore! 😛
Your work oscillates between stencils and paste-ups. How do you decide which technique to use for a particular piece?
It doesn’t oscillate! It is both!
Stencil is the technique, and pasting them up is a way to attach them to the wall. It’s like eating a SOUP with a SPOON…:P Anyway!
Because of the nature of my art, and because I travel a lot and paste in several cities, I repeat myself a lot mainly with my street pieces, so most of the time it’s just a CTRL + C, CTRL + V job…
But! I always try to do something new! Actually, no! I don’t try! 🙂 It just happens! It’s rare that I decide on the technique in advance and I keep it. Normally I just start painting with an idea, I do the things step by step, and I flow with the process. Many times I just feel something isn’t right, so normally this is the time when I invent a new technique or I differ from the well-known path…
But there are no rules. Some pieces are super easy and super conventional, but there are many adventurous ones too… In general I like to do the same thing but always do something different, so when I get fed up with something, then I just go off the path.
You’ve lived in Hungary (your home country), London, and Spain since 2022. How has each place influenced your work as an artist?
Influence? Maybe it’s not the right word!
London motivated me a lot. I don’t think I would be a street artist – at least a good one – if I had not moved to London. It was incredible to see all the pieces on the walls, and they absolutely encouraged me to carry one with my art. As I said, I am an experience addict, and I have to do things by myself, so it wasn’t enough to see them…
But! Even though there was a giant motivation at the beginning, I was pretty serious about not getting into other artists works, not checking their social media, and having my own unique style without too many influences… And I guess this is what I was bringing from Hungary, as an “influence.” The lack of influences…:P Back then street art and social media were far behind, so when I arrived in London I was like a plain canvas, and I could do my art without knowing anything about street art in general…
Apart from this, of course, all of these 3 cities inspired and influenced me, but not particularly! I am pretty sure that somewhere in my art there is London, Barcelona, and Budapest, just as there is Paris, Toulouse, Lisbon, Zagreb, China, and so on, but thank God! These influences are dissolved amongst each other…
Your art appears in cities across Europe. When you travel, do you plan interventions in advance, or do you prefer to create spontaneously depending on the environment you encounter?
Spontaneously! Absolutely!
This is one of the reasons why I love travelling with my art! I put a bunch of pieces in my backpack, and I just go with the flow…. I mean, I check for the “street art districts,” but I always leave the zones, and many times I just go off the path. If I create in my resident city, I know the streets, I know where to go, and obviously I mainly go where they are the most appreciated. Where the most people will see them, where they stay on the walls the most, where it isn’t too dangerous to put them up… It’s another kind of laziness that I hope I can afford after more than 10 years of hard work. 😛
But! If I go to a new city, this laziness doesn’t apply; I am way more creative, and I go many times to zones where no one goes.
It’s a less efficient but funnier, and purer way of doing it!
Where do you get your inspiration?
I am quite hyperactive; I do a lot of things, and I travel a lot, so inspiration comes from this way…
My brain is like a blender… All I see and all I experience on my way goes in, and it comes out as an artwork… My brain dismantles the complex experience, it grinds it to tiny components, and it puts it together again in a different way, in a different sequence…
It was one of the first times when I was high, like a hundred years ago. I closed my eyes, and I saw a million things swiftly passing by in front of my eyes… Colors, objects, shapes… Winter landscape, with dancing deers, then a sudden zoom to the cortex of a tree, which became a canyon, where the rocks were falling and smashing into smaller ones, then even smaller ones, starting to roll over, and all became an incredible castle that started to be overgrown by lush vegetation, and so on for like half an hour… And next time I saw them again, and again, and again… I guess my brain works this way…
Is there a particular message or emotion you want to convey through your work?
It was, but I found it too cheesy, so I try to compensate with other messages, emotions, and themes… I guess by now, my characters are just like us, humans… Different! One is like this, the other one is like that… One tries to talk about serious things, but others just don’t care… Others are grumpy, others are playful, and others are just completely normal…
For you, what are the advantages and disadvantages of social media?
What I really like about social media is that I have a platform where I have pretty much all my works that I can share with anyone… Look! This is me… I just love this, and also publicity is a big advantage! It helps us to be known, to be loved, and it makes us visible… Also it helps a ton to make some living out of our hobby, out of our passion, and it helps us to improve… A lot!
Thanks to social media. Instead of being chased like underground kids, we are almost celebrities. We can sell some stuff, which is definitely the way to grow! To be good you have to work a lot, and give up plenty of things.
And if you have no connection with the people who love what you do, who can encourage you when it is hard, and who will buy your works and put some money into your pocket, after a while, you will give up, work less, and improve very slowly…
The bad part is the algorithm itself, which is terrorizing you. Every month more and more, and it makes you do things that you don’t want to do… I mean, either you do them, or you miss the opportunity, and you lose a lot of publicity.
We have to do videos, but not too long ones. We have to add music and do stories, reels, and all this kind of shit just to stay inside the circle… Every month there is something new! It’s ridiculous, but it works like this. You are trying to please the algorithm, because basically the algorithm decides which art is good! It decides what it will show to people, and the one that it shows to us will get more likes and then more publicity…
And of course there are business interests behind it. Your artwork in a feed is basically nothing else but stuffing between the products that they want to sell… Also there is more and more pressure on us to advertise if we don’t want to fall behind, and that is creating a more and more commercialized street art scene…
Like you wouldn’t be an artist but a broker, an economist who tries to figure out how to earn 2-3% more. How to get 2-3% more likes…
The whole system is getting more and more fake, and art hostile… REAL ART hostile…
What advice would you give to someone who wants to become a street artist?
Nothing comes for free! 😛 🙂 Or if it comes, it’s shit! 😛 🙂
What I want to say is that in most of the cases if we want to do something incredible, it requires a shitload of work. Everything is possible.
In every person potentially there is a Cranio, a Seth Globepainter, a Zombie Squeegee, an HNRX, or a Teuthis, but it won’t come out if we don’t push it!
First we need to enjoy. Then if we want to be better, we have to start putting in the effort. And preferably close our ears to the flattering words of our friends who are saying how good we are…
Apart from this, a unique style, or doing something new that no one ever has done, is never a bad thing! 😛
Can you tell us about some of your upcoming projects?
I have way too many, and meanwhile I have no time at all… 🙁
But! A studio piece is very close. I will cut the wood around my floating Jesus nicely, following the black outline… That will be super wicked, and also it will be a new magic hollow! Something completely new… 🙂 😛
I will also have a bunch of new pieces. I’ll paste them up pretty much at the same time – about how is it to be a father… Simple scenes from the life of a family…
And of course the book!
Last question: do you have any film, series, or book recommendations?
It’s super difficult to recommend less than a hundred movies. So let me narrow it down to older, non-American, fucking awesome but less known movies!
– Winter Sleep.
– Mustang.
– Cirkus Columbia.
– Bibliotheque Pascal.
– Delta.
– The Pusher trilogy.
– Fish Tank.
– Shameless.
– Gangs of Wasseypur.
– Ratcatcher.
– Lunes al Sol.
– Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed.
– Irreversible.
– Hors Normes.
– Border.
– Shoplifters.
– Memories of Murder…
From the more recent – and all are less known: How to Have Sex, Aftersun, and War Pony…
I don’t have time to watch series. I saw Chernobyl 2 times, and I will watch it again soon, so I guess it’s more awesome alone than all the other series together, apart from the True detectives… 😛
Besides this, I can recommend documentary series:
Trainwreck: Woodstock 99, The Crime of the Century, O.J.: Made in America…
And books! My favorites are:
– Catcher in the Rye.
– 100 Years of Solitude.
– The Feast of the Goat.
– I Served the King of England.
– Blood Meridian.
– Slaughterhouse-Five.
– Things Fall Apart & No Longer at Ease.
Last but not least, a Hungarian one from László Németh that is translated to French as « Une possédée. »
This is a brilliant one, and even though it is quite old, it is still very relevant these days…
You can discover or rediscover my other Street Art interviews here.
