I'm JBOY. A conceptual artist with a street habit.

I've always believed the idea is the artwork, not the style or the finish. If you're here to check how neat my lines are, I've already lost. When I was a kid I used to 'borrow' Gary Larson books from the library and eventually return them when the guilt kicked in. Later I found Guy Billout and spent most of art school staring at his pictures instead of learning anything useful.

The idea

The idea is the whole point. I want the picture to do half the work and your brain to do the other half. You look, something doesn’t quite add up, and then it clicks. You get that little internal laugh, or it lands somewhere a bit closer to home than you expected. If I have to explain it, I’ve ruined it.

I’m not trying to be political or preach at anyone. There’s enough of that on the walls already. I’d rather make something you actually want to live with. Something you hang up, walk past every morning and still get a small kick out of. If it starts a conversation, great. If it starts an argument, that’s on you.

The street bit

I drifted into the urban art scene by mistake and have been trying to escape ever since. It keeps pulling me back like a clingy Henry the Hoover. Somewhere along the way I got hooked on street styles. Tags, throw-ups, stickers on the back of road signs, the rushed handwriting of people who'd rather not get caught. I nick that language and use it to tell jokes. Dry ones, usually at my own expense.

The drips

I like drips because I can't fully control them. They show how fast someone was working and how cold the wall was. You can't fake them. I've tried.

A lot of street writing is a reply to something. Someone writes on a toilet door and someone else answers underneath. A sticker on a road sign changes what the sign says. I love that kind of disruption, the quiet kind, not the look-at-me kind. Take something ordinary and twist it until it's a bit less boring. The Situationists called it détournement. I call it fiddling with things.

So I experiment. Most of it goes in the bin. Drip Works is where the experiments that survive end up, and it's turning into a proper study. The new work will push it a lot further.

How it gets made

I use charcoal, pencil and paint. Most of what I make ends up black and white because it looks clean and hides the chaos. I add one strong colour to carry the message. I’m not chasing perfection. I'd rather make something clever in a scruffy way than something flawless and forgettable. Sometimes it's sharp. Sometimes it's daft. Often it's just me trying to make sense of whatever nonsense I’ve seen that week. It’s all done by hand. In a year when half the internet is drawn by robots, that’s either old-fashioned or a selling point. I haven’t decided.

I did study art, although "study" might be generous. My proudest creative moment is still being taught technical drawing by Timmy Mallett's uncle. If you've never heard of him, he was an 80s kids' TV presenter who dressed like a tropical storm. Nice bloke. We still talk now and then. He's an artist these days too.

As for the anonymity, there’s no big reason. I’m not hiding from the police, just from small talk. I care about what I make, I notice when people are kind, and I answer every question eventually.

On the big screens

My work has been on billboards in Times Square twice. I’d love to say it was all part of a plan. There was no plan. There was barely a printer.

  • Resilience and Beached (2024), for Le Good Society's Let's Live With Less Plastic. Shown in Times Square and in the Netherlands, including Hoofddorp. Covered by The Ethicalist.

  • Seafood (2025), the same exhibition a year later. Times Square, the Netherlands and a London Lites screen in Chelsea. In Times Square it went up above a Mickey Mouse shop, which is the closest I’ll ever get to working for Disney. Covered by FAD Magazine.

The originals have sold, but the links still work so you can see what you missed. Everything else, from 2010 to now, is on Shows & Press.

Where else I've turned up