Over the past few years, we have had the immense pleasure of collaborating with the American fine artist Jerry Inscoe on a handful of commercial projects, as well as on a few book projects. We are happy to present a brand new gallery of original illustrations of his for Néojaponisme

Inscoe was a Washington D.C. graffiti pioneer. His early work is well documented in Roger Gastman’s Free Agents: A History of Washington D.C. Graffiti. Skateboarding was what initially sparked his romance with graffiti, a Powell Peralta ad setting the earliest of stylistic models until he came across copies of the classics subway art and spraycan art shortly thereafter. He incorporated these influences and was soon one of the ten people actively writing graffiti in D.C. in the late 80s. After high school, Inscoe moved almost annually due to school and work, with stops in Fort Lauderdale, Pittsburgh, Tulsa, Livermore, California, San Diego, and Berkeley. His travels stopped in 1995 when he settled in Portland, Oregon, his current home.

As Inscoe moved from city to city, his work evolved and matured, shifting from the early New York-influenced models to a more abstract and idealistic take on what graffiti could be. He synthesized aspects of his undergraduate design education and influence from myriad influences into his work. Collaborative drawings with San Francisco’s Raevyn were a big point of departure. Their projects were undertaken under the premise of image-making and abstraction, approaching the work from a vantage point opposite of graffiti done for graffiti’s sake. The pair would blindly scribble on paper, and then trade scrawls, with the intention of making paintable pieces out of the scribbles, or alter electrical engineering plans to construct lettering. These exercises, as well as trading outlines for pieces with New York legend Phase Two (originator of both the bubble letter and the use of arrows in graffiti lettering) and Transcend crew co-founder Karl123 infused Inscoe with the desire to create highly original work that did not conform to the aesthetic standards of traditional graffiti.

Deconstructivist architecture was a giant influence, in particular, the drawings and renderings of Iranian-born British architect Zaha Hadid. Inscoe’s work is itself a formal extension of the Deconstructivist outpouring of the last twenty years- a reaction to more typical graffiti artwork in which three-dimensional lettering is rendered. Reacting to the work of writers like Delta, Zedz, and Daim, Inscoe inverts, decompiles, and reassembles three-dimensional space. He is constantly reducing and abstracting: lines and arcs mass and converge with gothic insidiousness, defying isometric and axonometric mores. Postmodern typographic elements, tribal angularity, and more typical NY-influenced wildstyle lettering also come into play in Inscoe’s work, along with the occasional droopy-eyed cartoon character, though they most often take the back seat to his spatial constructions.

As Inscoe’s work has evolved, he has simultaneously worked in numerous fields outside of writing. He has created best-selling apparel graphics for companies such as Nike, Tribal, Upper Playground, Osiris, Scion, Fity24SF, and others.