BIO
Jason Harrington, artist’s moniker Rif Raf Giraffe, was born and raised in Kansas City. He attended college at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lived in the city for a decade. He returned home in 2013 and settled into the Crossroads neighborhood where he began his mural painting career. After several commissions and solo gallery shows, he started traveling to other cities to work. In 2015 he went to the Wynwood neighborhood in Miami for the first time and was inspired by what a neighborhood full of colorful murals could bring to a community. In 2017 he and his wife Ami organized the first of their mural festivals in the Crossroad, five years later SpraySeeMO has put up around 150 murals in KC, has a sister festival in Miami, and expanded to Los Angeles in 2021. Along the way he has continued his prolific art career working with high profile clients and painting in cities halfway across the globe traveling with his wife by his side.
WHY
When I think of what drives my art and desire to create it I feel, like most things in life, it has evolved over time and continues to change as I continue to experience more. As I approach midlife, I take more time to reflect on what I have achieved and what I still desire to do. Then I self-analyze my drive for why. The answer I usually come back to is that creating art is all I have ever known and wanted to do. It is my form of communication and the vehicle for sharing what I have learned. The messages have always varied from comedic to serious, aesthetic pattern to political commentary. The characters that I draw and paint reflect the behaviors of society. Murals, for their part as public artworks are a way to share information and stories to the masses. Overall, I have gotten to live a dream of constant creation while endlessly critiquing our world and what drives it to be the place that it is. I feel blessed to be a professional artist. I know not many people get to achieve that in life, so I pay respect to that by putting everything I am into my craft.
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