Like many kids growing up in the city, the artist known as Born spray-painted his pseudonym around town. But it was less an adolescent marking his territory than an artist creating designs. He discovered M.C. Escher and marveled at Leonardo’s blend of fine art, science, invention and mechanics, at which point his letter-forms—the basis of graffiti art—began to change. His style became more gridded and mathematical; more abstract; more art than text. The abandoned buildings and polluted underpasses, places where graffiti thrives, still inform the aesthetics of Born’s fine art, as does his career as an auto mechanic. He incorporates the grime and trash of those derelict spaces with the grease and rust of the auto shop to compose images of beauty from castoffs and found objects, allowing the materials to guide his creative process. Born’s influences range from Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Vladimir Tatlin and Kurt Schwitters to his parents, who restored and decorated their 1910 family home in Atlanta’s historic Inman Park neighborhood.
