I’ve known Louie Gasparro for over forty years. We both grew up in Long Island City, Queens. In my earliest memory of Louie, he is wearing a red pinstripe baseball uniform. We were both about eleven at the time. “Who’s that kid?” I ask my best friend, Lan. Louie looked like a jock. “That’s Louie Gasparro. That kid does it all, baseball, football, basketball. He’s going to play baseball in Japan.”
Louie had an intense look about him. He wasn’t talkative or boastful, like some of the guys in our neighborhood. He was steady and serious.
In the Long Island City of the seventies and eighties, the trains were often bombed with graffiti. We’d see them on the elevated platforms roaring over our heads. Some of the graffiti was garish. Some of it was beautiful. I can’t say exactly when, but I remember Louie began tagging the trains with his art.
Louie’s work really stood out. He had a knack for combining brilliant and evocative colors and creating original designs. When I saw some of his art, I said, “Wow, this guy can draw too.”
Like all the graffiti artists we knew growing up, Louie snuck into train yards and into tunnels when the trains weren’t in service. He walked on live tracks, carefully avoiding the third rail. Doing graffiti was a high-wire act. You had to be both sneaky and daring. Kids put their lives at risk scaling buildings, hanging upside down, or dangling from the edge of a building to tag a surface. As legendary graffiti artist Al Diaz has said, in the early days, the average age of graffiti artists was nine to fourteen. Whether you deemed yourself an artist, or not, you had to have balls of steel to tag your work in a public place. And the more dangerous the situation, the more admired the work was. For kids like us, graffiti was a way to make a mark. To be seen.
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But what always stood out with Louie’s graffiti work was its originality and vision. Even as a kid. Louie always was and still is, first and foremost, an artist. An exceptional artist.
I didn’t know how big Louie’s career had blown up until I’d read his debut book Don1, the King from Queens: Life and Photos of a NYC Transit Graffiti Master. In this epic work of NYC history, Louie writes about his fascination in discovering the work of Don1. After eventually finding Don1, Louie details the relationship that he developed with the older artist.
Louie has said that Don1 became an enigma to him.
“I first noticed his name when I was 10 years old. Again, taking the RR subway on 36th avenue. I came onto the platform and BOOM! Right there parked, on the train was a Don1 piece (short for masterpiece). I was flabbergasted! The letters were colored in cascade green with polka dots. He replaced the letter “O” with a cartoon of himself smoking a joint. A big cloud with a dancing snoopy next to it! It was nothing short of just amazing to me.”
Louie’s second book, Kolorstorm: The Art of Louie “Kr.One,” details his 30-plus year career. The book chronicles his graffiti work through dozens of photographs, sketches, paintings, illustrations and more, including an introduction to “graffantasy” — a term he coined to describe the convergence of graffiti with fantastical images.
As graffiti has moved from underground to mainstream, Louie has been selling his artwork all over the world.
And while graffiti was Louie’s first love, he has also been a performing musician since his twenties, touring with bands all over the world. In the nineties, Louie played drums with Blitzpeer, a heavy metal group. He developed the logos for most of the bands he was involved in.
Louie was recently featured in 5Pointz, an award-winning documentary film. He has more film projects, as director, writer and actor, in progress.
I had been thinking about Louie for the past few years, having seen him talking about his art on social media. We’ve been orbiting the same circles. He’s done some art exhibits with Al Diaz and other people I know. But we hadn’t seen each other since about 1985. I sent him a note via Instagram, but who reads their DMs, right? A few weeks ago, Louie read an article I had written where I mentioned his artwork. He reached out and we met up to talk.
Even though we hadn’t seen each other for about thirty-six years, we didn’t skip a beat. Walking up to each other on the street, we started sparring, throwing fake punches in the air. Just like the old days. We were both out of breath quickly. And laughing.
“Some people say I look like Mussolini now that I don’t have hair,” said Louie. I giggled.
“I guess that means you agree since you laughed,” he added.
We spent the night having a few drinks and talking. One of eleven children, most of whom were born in Bari, Italy, Louie speaks the Barese dialect. All dialects sound funny to other people. Barese sounds like Italian mixed with Chinese. Having heard Sicilian growing up and studying Italian in school, I speak, if speaking is what you’d call it, a hybrid Florentine-Sicilian dialect.
“You gotta stop speaking that Florentine,” said Louie. “What are you, Dante?”
As mentioned, Louie is now in post-production on a few films. One is about Don1.
“I get to portray him. It’s an amazing story. It’s based on my book and a one man play I’ve written about him. It’s called Pumpin’ Cool. My writing partner and I have another film titled Chronicles of a Missman.”
Before Louie left, he pulled out a USB drive containing his old photos, drawings, and paintings.
“This is the only backup I have of these images.”
“Can I make a copy of this?” I said scrolling through this trove of historical artifacts. The images were beautiful, a mixture of his graffiti from the seventies and recent artworks.
Louie looked at me. “I don’t even know what’s on this drive,” he said. After thinking about it he looked me in the eye and said “I trust you. Guard this with your life.”
“You know I will,” I said.
Louie Gasparro
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9156477/
Instagram: @originalkr1
[email protected]
[email protected]
Mike Fiorito
www.fallingfromtrees.info
https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/mike_fiorito
Author
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