Craig Costello: from underground graffiti artist to spray-paint entrepreneur

Andy Warhol famously said that “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art”, but Craig Costello’s shift from street artist to successful entrepreneur was not part of his game plan. "I do believe that necessity is the mother of all invention," says the Brooklyn-born artist and founder of ink and marker brand Krink – a portmanteau of his tag and the word ‘ink’.

Costello spent his formative years as a graffiti artist in San Francisco in the early 90s. When he couldn’t find the tools or the colours needed to create his now signature 'drip' technique, he fashioned his own. "Graffiti spilled out onto the streets in the late 80s," says the man also known as KR. "Trains had drippier, more fluid tags, but the inks faded in the sunlight. The surfaces weren’t smooth either; they were dirty and dusty. Plus, the colour silver wasn’t used at all on trains. So I made this hybrid – a genetic mutation!"

Back then, Costello would mix his own metallic paint and thick bitumen-like pigment, which he’d pour into old soda bottles and shoe-polish applicators – recycled vessels that were ideal for applying colour to a multitude of surfaces, from mailboxes to shop fronts. Adapted fire extinguishers are still his tool of choice when creating large-scale public art commissions; he uses them to spray walls with clouds of paint that quickly transform into giant barcodes of cascading colour. Today, Krink is sold worldwide, stocked everywhere from Amazon to specialist spray-paint suppliers, and used by both underground graffiti exponents and acclaimed contemporary artists, including Tom Sachs and British painter/photographer Nick Waplington.

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"I guess I was always a bit of
a tinkerer," says the softly spoken Costello, who has even covered a specially commissioned Mini Cooper in streams of runny white paint. It was only when he moved back to his native New York in 1997 that Krink really took off. What started out as a cottage industry became a lucrative business operation when skatewear label Alife began stocking his markers and inks. "I was making everything by hand in my apartment, producing labels on my inkjet printer and sticking them on bottles," Costello remembers. "Eventually I found a factory to work with, and that helped me to jump-start the brand."

Twenty years on, he has a number of high-profile fashion and lifestyle collaborations under his belt: Costello has applied his drip design to Absolut Vodka bottles, sell-out Nike Air Force 1 sneakers, a limited-edition high-tech denim collection for Levi’s Japan, and
a capsule range of handbags and accessories for Coach.

Altogether different, however, is his new collaboration with Moncler. To celebrate the launch this month of its Hong Kong flagship, the luxury outerwear brand has positioned 12,000 figurines of Mr Moncler – its cartoon ambassador, complete with groomed Santa-like beard and chic quilted jacket – in locations around the city. Five hundred of the 50cm statuettes will be personalised in silver marker by Costello and given away to the public.

This seems an unusual pairing, not least because Costello is known for creating huge works of art in the manner of a Ghostbuster, blasting colour at buildings and walls with his fire-extinguisher 'paint gun'. But the artist sees things differently: "The roots of Moncler start with alpine mountaineering and wanting to develop a jacket for warmth and practical purposes. Today, Moncler stays true to this technology, but it cares very much about style and design. In that sense, the label is very similar to us: Krink began out of necessity. I developed products with a practical use, but the brand’s aesthetic is just as important."

If getting your hands on a collectible KR-signed Mr Moncler from Hong Kong proves too tricky, keep an eye out for those Krink fire extinguishers, sold in small numbers as Duchampian ready-mades. "They are speciality products, so often we sell them empty as sculptures," says Costello, who is currently creating works on paper and canvas in his Brooklyn studio. "It’s a bit different because I’m scaling down so much from huge walls, but it’s been good."

This no-nonsense rationale
has certainly served Costello well in business, and thankfully, from 
a creative perspective, he has stuck firmly to his guns.