Erni Vales

He attended the High School of Art and Design which marks the first time Vales ventured out of the Lower East Side to an uptown part of the city. It was there that he got into the graffiti scene and became creatively bonded to peers through graffiti and the new culture called Hip Hop. He painted his first subway train around 1983 and joined the art group Graffiti Productions Inc. where Vales first began painting on canvas. This group, which included artists like Futura, Crash, Daze, and Lady Pink, staged art shows and openings and helped propel him forward artistically.

As a young and malleable artist, Vales art was influenced heavily by the artists around him at the time and it would take many years for his own style to blossom, but graffiti and the school of hard knocks taught him many things as he slowly developed his own identifiable style. Although this style changed over the decades, the foundation of Erni Vales art remains and can be seen in the stunning 3D graffiti art that has made him world famous. Graffiti on trains taught Vales how to scale his work from a sketch on paper to the broadside of a train just by eye, and working quickly and efficiently without anyone taking notice taught the artist to work fast without sacrificing quality or content. Vales says that graffiti has become his life partner and like any older couple, they fight and argue but without graffiti art he wouldn’t have ever become the special person and artist he is today.

In the early 1990s, Vales began working in Hollywood. He would make murals for the CBS TV series, The Flash, where he was tasked with creating 5 new murals per episode, each portraying a different style or look so it would look like they were all done by a different artist. He mastered the paintbrush and aging techniques in his work and then joined the scenic artist union. This afforded Vales access to some fantastic old-school scenic artists and the knowledge they shared with him made his artistic arsenal grow way beyond the spray can and airbrush which he had already mastered by 1990. Today Vales doesn’t focus on process but the artistic flow that moves through him naturally, like a professional bicyclist not thinking about pedaling, and when he is feeling down, veering toward complaining over creating, he thinks back to his mentors and inspirations, Chuck Close and Tamara DeLempica. These artists were stricken by what many would have called career-ending disabilities yet readapted and overcame these obstacles to reinvent themselves.

The list of awards and accomplishments in Erni Vales career is staggering, but some of the highlights include the 70 subway cars he painted that have become part of an open air free public gallery of art in NYC and the influence that work has had on accomplished young artists worldwide. In addition, Vales painted the rainbows on Mariah Carey’s body for her Rainbow album, painted the LV logo on L’il Kim’s body, and graffitied Eminem’s face for a Rolling Stone Magazine photo shoot. He has designed 15 restaurants and nightclubs, most recently in Moscow, and worked for almost every corporation, including having his own jewelry line and a sold out line of watches with Invicta. But Vales proudest artistic achievements to date are being the first graffiti artist to open his own exclusive gallery in the heart of Wynwood, Miami, and in 1993, creating, developing, and being the first graffiti artist to do a faux 3D piece on a wall in LA. This artwork changed the game and gave rise to a second culture of graffiti and it spurred on the release of his 2nd book, 3D Street Art: Off the Walls.