See One: Recession Rebel

Queens-born self-taught artist See One (aka Jemal McClary) is a street-savvy renaissance man: an illustrator, painter, T-shirt graffiti artist and graphic designer. While walking the streets of New York as a little boy, McClary became infatuated with graffiti. "The bold colours, lines and composition grabbed my attention."

Throughout elementary and high school, McClary continued to practise drawing on scraps of paper and notepads. Soon, he discovered "graffiti's cousin, street art, and started making stencils and stickers... small stuff that I could sneak around with." As McClary grew up, so did his artistic ambition. Eventually those stickers and stencils led to paintings, which turned into T-shirts, which grew into live street art projects.

On any given weekend in NYC's Soho district, McClary can be found on a bustling street corner sketching out bold faces drawn with dramatic, Manga or comic-styled lines on cardboard, paper or T-shirts. "I network, paint, promote my art and enjoy the day." The project, Paint on the Pavement, not only serves as free public entertainment, but also "keeps my air conditioning bill down," jokes McClary. Meanwhile, his flashy anime, graffiti and pop culture-influenced pieces - which range from $40 to $120 - are set at recession-friendly prices for his fans.

But with higher-end galleries such as Deitch Projects or Peres Projects featuring manifold street artists, and with big boys like Shepard Fairey earning international repute for their work, isn't McClary tempted to display his work in a traditional gallery space? "Not really. More people will see my work in Soho than in a gallery somewhere - and there's not a three-year waiting list."

Check out HUCK#015 for the full feature on NYC's Recession Rebels.

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See One: Recession Rebel (text) by Faith-Ann Young is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.