RISK X NATHAN OTA aka COOZ WC…. MONTANA STORE LA

Posted September 3rd, 2010 at 03:32am by Risky

A few weeks ago, I got an unexpected call from Nathan Ota. Nathan Ota aka Cooz was an old classmate from University High School. Nate and I both got away with murder at Uni Hi. Our art teachers bailed us out of trouble time and time again. I’ll save those stories for another time. We both won National Scholastic art awards and received art scholarships out of high school, but more importantly we started out graffiti careers together. Cooz and I were In WCA together, we traveled the city painting whatever walls we could find. We went to different schools and lost contact, however I often wondered what happened to him. He told me he had heard some of his students at Otis Parsons talk about me and had been loosely following me, but had not told any of them he was an old writer. One day he had come across some students doing some sort of Graffiti project at school and couldn’t resist the itch to catch a throw up. After that, he dropped some science on his students about old school graffiti. He got my info from them and gave me a call. After catching up I told him I was painting a wall downtown and invited him to stop by.  It was great seeing Nathan, a few days later he came by my studio to check out some of my work and show me what he has been working on as well. His stuff was awesome! I showed him some of the newer paint brands and he played with some cans.

Not bad after 25 years!!!!

After a little while we started free styling and we knew we had to do some collaborations ….

We decided to do a few things I.E. I would go speak to his students, and he would come do a meet and greet at the MONTANA LA store. We also decided to do a few collaboration pieces for a few upcoming gallery shows. At the galleries request I can’t post those photos yet  but here’s the Montana collaboration and his signing at the store…..