Featured Artist - Diohe

Deo is a very talented and honorable artist, and member of the underground graffiti community. He has been around for some time now. Always developing with the changing times and pushing styles, whether it be a funky b'boy with public lettering or complex-wild style with a beautiful scenic background or something quite bizarre and twisted.

Deo is definitely a master of the arts with aerosol or with a paint brush...

We took some time out with the man himself.....

I always liked graffiti. I remember first seeing it around the Sunnybank/Altandi area about 1985. Then in 1986 I met a kid at little athletics who was about 3 or 4 yrs older then me that wrote 'Tooz'. After I started showing interest, he would talk about the pieces he was working on. I remember one day he brought a sketch for a piece he was doing that said 'Paradise', it was getting painted at Browns Plains. Then one afternoon he brought 'Subway Art' in to training. I was so intrigued by it. I was firing off heaps of questions and later that day he did a sketch in my school book. Just of my name, with barcode in the 3d and a character next to it.

From then on in class whenever an opportunity struck I'd be drawing my toy little bubble letters on every heading and poster board I could get my hands on.

In High School I started meeting other guys who were into it.
There were a few good writers who went to that school.
Porns, Disne, Spiro, Peru and me were the only ones who
actually stuck with it though.

I did my very first piece in 1988 on my turned up trampoline, and my 2nd one a few days later with Disne. That year I did about 8 pieces in total, mainly with Porns. None of them very good. Porns on the other hand was always good at it. It just seemed like he was a natural. I'd love to have flicks of the stuff he was doing back then.

Around 1991 at Tafe, I met Bore during an Air Brushing class. He brought Blex in to say hi one night and they basically joined our crew on the spot. Soon after that we met Phink, Moder, Bere,

Chore and the twins Crome and Brael.

That was the DNA crew. About 6months later Disne moved to the northside and started hanging out with a crew that wrote RSA. Dudes like Brat, Brek, Dine, Snupe, Web and Sizer. Not long after that THC was formed as an amalgam of the 2 crews. THC was a wild time, but sadly it only lasted for about 3 to 4 years before things started catching up with us and the crew basically folded.

Most of the people who wrote THC pretty much stopped around 1994/95, so out of the ashes came TBK. With 2 writers from THC – Bore and me, and 2 writers from KOC – Reals and Dcide. It was started as tight knit unit, and has gone the distance for the next 15 years. Adding heaps of new members along the way...

I myself stopped writing for the crew in 2004/5, mainly because I felt like I wanted to take a new direction, but also because I was having a lot of trouble with my vision. It'd been in constant and steady decline since my early to mid teens but by this point my Doctor had declared me legally blind even with my lenses. So in 2007 I had surgery on my right eye, and after about year and a half I could see well enough to paint properly again.It wasn't until 2009 though that I started doing pieces again, and in April of that year the lads from TFH asked me to join up with them.

So since then I've been putting up both TFH to represent the new and THC to represent the old. It keeps me balanced...