Episode 25: Street art, neon, collectibles and NFTs: the talented Pure Evil
Pure Evil is the alias of Welsh-born artist Charles Uzzell Edwards. This multi-disciplinary street artist has been involved in Banksy’s pop-up gallery, exhibited around the world, at the Saatchi Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, at the Culture Gallery in Cape Town, and at the Baker Gallery in Cologne, among others. He runs the Pure Evil gallery in Shoreditch, London.
Pure Evil is born…
“I created this identity of pure evil, and started going out and drawing bunnies everywhere, and writing pure evil and genuinely annoying people, which is always the that's always a lot of fun.”
Image 1: Sergeant Pepper Lonely Heart Bastards
“So I thought to myself, let's do a pastiche of that and I'll pick the worst people I can think of. So you've got Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Lenin in the front. You've got Margaret Thatcher who I didn't like you know you've got serial killers. So you've got all these horrible, horrible people…”
“UV ink is brilliant because you can't see it unless you've got the UV want. So I wrote all these rude words to every single character. So it's kind of like, an extra level. And with my whole idea behind pure evil, it's like, if you look into things and scratch the surface, there's usually darkness underneath.”
Image 2: Richard Burton's nightmare
“I think I have two brains, I have the artist’s brain, where I'll just, you know, hang out and you know, cackle with glee and make wacky art. But then also, I understand that I have to do the other side of it, which is marketing myself, making my own website, you know, doing my NFTs, and letting people know about what I do.
“I made this strong and simple image of Liz Taylor, using this tear that I took from someone's photograph on MySpace…And boy, the sales of this print went bananas, everyone wanted a sad crying Liz Taylor.”
“And I continually sample from the internet, taking images and taking inspiration and right-click save on images.”
Image 3: Infinite Neon Bunny
“all it can see is the reflection of itself on the front of the box, which reflects the back of the box, which reflects the sides of the box. So it's seeing an infinite reflection of itself.”
Image 4: Bunny Fingers
“I've never worked so hard as I have on these pieces because I decided that I was going to do the piece itself using children's book pages. So you have this sort of innocence of these children's stories from about 100 years old.”
“There's the innocence of the children's book pages, but then there's this dark symbol of the black bunny. And then there's this sort of religious handshake, and kind of poking fun at organized religion.”
Image 5 & 6: Pure Evil Bunny
“And it's just a fun character because you can draw it in about five seconds, it's really something that you can do super fast, which is handy because I like to sort of tag it, you know, here, there and everywhere, wherever I go.”
“So I'm hoping that one day someone's going to take one of my ceramic pieces onto Antiques Roadshow, and then I will feel like I've actually arrived as an artist.”
Book Recommendation
Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols by Henry Dreyfuss
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