Craig Costello is seated at his desk inside a 4,500-square-foot warehouse space just off the Hudson River, in Industry City, Brooklyn. This is the headquarters of his paint-supply and creative firm, Krink, which moonlights for brands no less than Nike, MINI, and Moncler. When I ask Costello how his early life as a graffiti writer grew into the current operation—which now moves paint by the truckload—his response is modest, bordering on evasive.
“I cannot stress enough,” he says, “as a graffiti writer, I was just a kid having fun. Sure, you’ve got your college-boy ideals, but I wasn’t like, ‘Yo, this is my art and I’m doing big things here.’ To be honest, I was just running around with my friends, writing graffiti for the adventure of it and then drinking 40s in the park.”
The name Krink is itself a jokey mash-up of Costello’s nom de graffiti, “KR,” and the company’s flagship product, “ink.” If Krink began as a freewheeling DIY operation founded in the corner of Costello’s apartment in the early ’90s, mixing up small batches of paint to share with friends, by the mid-2000s it had an international cult following that included surfers multiple oceans away, such as Ellis Ericson, who remembers his first time seeing Krink markers at the local skate shops around Sydney, Australia.
“A few shops always had their back walls stocked with Krink,” Ericson says. “If you were just getting into surfing, skating, playing in bands, and graffiti, you took one look at those pens and thought, ‘I bet I could do some damage with those things.’ I remember going home and blasting all my surfboards with Krink paint. That’s just what you did as a grom at that time in Sydney. Later, I came to admire how the pens run and drip, effortlessly harking back to Craig’s own work.”
Trying to grasp the nuances of what catapulted Krink to such renown is a little like trying to explain to an uninitiated person the nearly imperceptible differences between a big-wave gun and a small-wave glider, a thruster versus a two-plus-one, or, as Costello later puts it, the progression “from D-fin to cutaway,” as he code-switches perfectly into surf jargon in an attempt to help me understand graffiti jargon that at times goes over my head.
Costello began surfing later in life—first making trips with fellow artist and friend Barry McGee down to Ocean Beach, San Francisco, in his twenties before he started surfing avidly in the Rockaways following his return to New York. As we chat, he mixes surf slang with a range of other interests, from hip-hop to hardcore, skating to breakdancing, graffiti to fine art to fashion to design, with a fluency that’s sometimes disorienting.
When he sees that I’m picking up only half of what he’s putting down, he laughs. “Sometimes I think that I just need to show you things,” he says, reaching across his desk for a black 4-ounce bottle of Krink. He holds it with its silver label pointed out toward me, squeezing it between his thumb and forefinger, and then unscrews the cap to reveal the mop, a short foam tip soaked with fresh black ink. The small container could easily be mistaken for a shoe-polish bottle because, at one time, it was a shoe-polish bottle—and here, the way that Krink emerged from Costello’s youth as a graffiti writer becomes clear.
“Graffiti has always been about the reappropriation of existing goods for creativity,” he says. “You’re stealing the spaces you use to paint. You’re breaking into the janitor’s closet or doing whatever you can to get your hands on new materials.”
Costello pauses again to define some basic terms of art as he holds up the Krink bottle. “So, in graffiti, stealing is called ‘racking,’” he says. “I used to rack these shoe-polish bottles and add my own ink, which is a trade secret.”
Costello began racking the bottles from drugstores in his twenties, while attending the once highly esteemed, now shuttered San Francisco Art Institute. But it was growing up in Queens, New York, where he received his early education at the epicenter of the graffiti world, in a pre-internet era when knowledge of any emerging subculture was still hard-won and at a time when graffiti was spilling out into the streets from its origins on subway cars. He remembers the crude design of markers prior to perfecting the use of the shoe-polish bottles.
“The markers people used were homemade, and they would be really crappy, cobbled together, and messy,” he says. “You’d take a felt chalkboard eraser and break that off, stick the end of it into a shampoo bottle filled with ink, and go write. But you could only hit one spot before you had to toss the whole thing. You’d have ink all over your hands and couldn’t really move around the city with it. The shoe-polish bottle was easy to carry, it was neat, and you could still catch a really fat tag. I could squeeze the bottle harder to make it drip, which was a really big part of my style. The same as in surfing, everyone in graffiti has their own style. My style was born out of making these homemade inks and DIY experimentation with tools that allowed me to control long drips of ink, which at the time was really unique, so that if you saw it, you’d know it was me.”
I ask Costello to elaborate more on his style, and again he becomes deferential, avoiding the grave sin of overstating one’s place in the cultural hierarchy. “What I was doing at the time was par for the course for a New York graffiti writer—smashing a highway spot or hitting a rooftop,” he says. “I’m not a wild-style technician. I’m not a style-master general. I’m a pretty basic New York graffiti writer.”
Yet the influences Costello brought from New York were distinct enough to catch the eye of other graffiti writers when he landed in San Francisco. “New York at that time was like
the center point of a rock hitting a lake in the graffiti world,” he says. “Everything rippled out from there, and each city then evolved in its own landscape. This was before the rise of internet media, so you still had to visit a place in order to see what was going on. Whereas today it’s all right in front of you online, and whatever’s happening in Berlin and France could look the exact same as whatever’s happening in New York. San Francisco was kind of bubbling at that time, and it was markedly different than New York.”
Barry McGee, who grew up in San Francisco’s Sunset District, surfing and writing graffiti under the name Twist, remembers taking note of Costello’s work. “In graffiti, you tend to notice when there’s someone new in town in this very old-fashioned way,” he says. “You see a new hand start popping up. Even before I met Craig, I could tell he obviously had a very nice hand, and, at that time in the early ’90s, he was pushing beyond what others were doing.”
McGee had recently graduated from San Francisco Art Institute, where Costello was enrolled. The two got introduced through a friend of a friend and began writing graffiti together, along with Ruby Neri from Marin, another SFAI student, who, under the moniker Reminisce, prolifically painted wild horses galloping and grazing around the city. To anyone familiar with the work of McGee and Neri—later prominent figures in what art critics call the Mission School—there’s a certain thrill to imagining them and Costello mobbing around San Francisco in the dead of night, covering the city with the early work that formed their signature styles.
The stark environmental differences between San Francisco and New York also necessitated Costello’s continued experimentation with materials and tooling, the same way a surfer arriving to the North Shore from California would have to reconsider their quiver. “New York was a very dirty city with rough surfaces, so you had to use materials that could penetrate all that grime,” Costello says. “People in San Francisco often did colorful pieces using Krylon, which would have been amateur night in New York, where you had to paint streets with Rust-Oleum. Krylon is a much finer paint, and unless you’re painting on a primed wall, it would just get absorbed into brick or cinder block. But San Francisco had its own challenges in that it was actually a very dusty city, so trying to use the felt-tip markers that I wrote with in New York, they would get clogged with dust immediately.”
This led Costello to the shoe-polish bottles, which featured a small valve designed to help purge dust from the tip of the marker. “Once you cleared all the dust out, you could write with it again just as clearly, so it was just super reliable and effective,” he says. “Plus, the way it wrote had its own unique style built in.” Costello continued experimenting with the formula of the ink to allow the marker to drip in a controlled way as he wrote.
“I think I still have one of the first shoe-polish bottles,” McGee says. “It was a constant trial and error with those things to get the ink to flow in just the right way. Eventually Craig got the perfect formula, first for black ink and later for silver. You could do a complete tag over a dusty mailbox and it looked great. The silver in particular was kind of revolutionary at the time. It captured a lot of the unsaid things in graffiti about the story of American excess—having this flashy ink that drips everywhere and trying to write your name all over without ever getting caught.”
That spirit of excess also manifested in the way Costello turned his study of photography at SFAI toward documenting his exploits in graffiti. “A cigarette would come out and then the camera would come out,” McGee says, remembering the composure and intensity required for Costello to take on a double night shift as graffiti writer and then photographer. “We would go climb a fire escape or a rooftop, and he’d bring all his camera equipment with him to document it perfectly on black-and-white film. That was a big change in graffiti, because he was doing professional photography with a tripod and framing things in some really abstract ways—whether it was the angles of buildings or someone’s feet hanging over a ledge. He would capture all these amazing images, and a lot of times I would be so busy working that I didn’t know what he was doing until later.”
Costello departed from San Francisco after finishing school, soon returning to New York, but his graffiti and photography from that time period began garnering wider recognition, particularly in The Art of Getting Over, a keynote book on graffiti published in 1999 by Stephen Powers, a friend of Costello’s who rose to prominence as a New York–based artist writing graffiti under the name ESPO.
Back home, Costello settled into an apartment on the Lower East Side. The founders of the streetwear brand Alife had just opened their first shop a few blocks away and suggested Costello start selling Krink in their store.
“I never had any intention of selling it,” Costello says. “I come from a background of racking your own materials, so my first reaction was, ‘Who’s gonna buy this? You don’t spend money to write graffiti.’ But I knew a big thing at Alife was working with young artists, so I was like, ‘Yeah, okay, I’ll do it as a creative project.’ They helped me design it and took out a full-page ad in the Fader to market it.”
Costello made 30 bottles, and they sold out immediately. Then came another 50 bottles that sold out, quickly making it one of the best-selling items in the shop.
“From day one of selling Krink, there was so much demand that I could never keep up with it. A shop would order 50 bottles and I’d only be able to deliver 40,” Costello says, remembering the era before he found a factory that could scale to fill orders, when he was still mixing up paints in his apartment or art studio.
Krink also established a grassroots presence across the landscape of downtown New York as Costello continued passing along bottles to his friends, most notably an up-and-coming crew of graffiti writers and artists known as Irak, which included photographer Ryan McGinley, skateboarder Jason Dill, and artist Dash Snow.
“The guys in Irak were going out every night and annihilating the streets,” Costello says. “They did so much graffiti that you couldn’t come downtown at that time without people being like, ‘What is all this silver stuff everywhere?’ People would literally say that and they’d find out, ‘Oh, that’s Krink.’ There was nothing like that at the time. It was a homemade ink by a graffiti writer. Because it was downtown New York, word spread really quickly. Whether you were a cool-guy designer on a trip to check out the streetwear shops, a fashion buyer, or a journalist looking for a story, people started to put it together that all the graffiti kids are doing this, with this, and I can buy it here.”
The founder of Irak, Kunle Martins, who writes graffiti under the name Earsnot, remembers sharing Costello’s initial skepticism of Krink’s commercial viability, given the culture of graffiti was founded on stealing materials. “I thought Craig was wasting his time at first, but once he figured out the ratios for the paint, there was nothing better,” Martins says. “At that time in New York City, a big, thick, silver mop tag really helped you stand out and make a name for yourself because there weren’t many people using them. I don’t know that I would have had the confidence to do anything outside of graffiti and shoplifting if it weren’t for seeing people like Craig in the generation above me doing other cool things like that.”
As Krink grew, Costello also began thinking more expansively about his own work as a graffiti writer. “Graffiti, like surfing, can have a lot of stifling rules, haters who can’t see past certain things, and a lot of stigmas attached,” he says.
While graffiti is traditionally rooted in letter writing, Costello moved toward painting in a more abstract, minimalist style meant to call a different form of attention to the same spaces he’d placed work in the past. “I would paint mailboxes, a doorway or window—sometimes using just four paint strokes—and the lines of paint would drip straight down,” he continues. “It had a more sculptural and graphic feel.”
It was a subtle change in his work, but Costello remembers people outside the world of graffiti taking note. When photographs of his drip paintings were featured on the cover and inside of Arkitip magazine, the French designer agnès b. approached Costello at a party, asking if he knew who had painted them. “When I told her it was me, she pointed to one of the photos of a mailbox I’d painted and said, ‘This is sculpture.’ It was really important to have that experience confirming my vision was clear.”
At that point, in the early 2000s, a confluence of factors pushed Krink toward greater commercial success and Costello’s work into the spotlight. Hip-hop and streetwear was at the center of the pop-cultural zeitgeist, and major brands wanted to market products by collaborating with street artists, in turn receiving coverage from on-the-rise fashion blogs like Hypebeast that kept the whole flywheel spinning. Soon Costello had a Krink-designed MacBook case in Apple stores, and MINI approached him to paint one of their cars.
“They wanted me to paint the cars just like I was painting mailboxes in the street,” he says. “Because I was part of that whole downtown art scene, my phone just kept ringing with opportunities to apply my work to these commercial design gigs.”
As Costello received more requests for custom installations, he also got interested in painting on a larger scale. “At the time, my studio was in this weird, half-abandoned building with some other art studios in Brooklyn,” he says. “The guy I shared my space with was a carpenter who had an air compressor. I started using it to load up fire extinguishers with paint, and I’d practice with them in the building, spraying various things. I did the elevator and the stairwells. Instead of writing letters as you would in graffiti, which is pretty hard to control with a fire extinguisher, I would just do lines, back and forth, as I’d done on the mailboxes or doorways but in much bigger spaces. Then I started experimenting with garden sprayers attached to a hand pump to control the effects. I saw it as an extension of what I did in graffiti, reappropriating some ordinary object or tool in order to paint.”
The fire extinguishers and garden sprayers opened Costello up to large-scale installations in fine-art venues, including Palais de Tokyo, Pera Museum, and Les Abattoirs Musée, as well as commercial collaborations with Red Bull and Stüssy.
“The issue I found with doing installations, to be frank, is that eventually they get painted over. It doesn’t last, and there’s nothing that you can buy if you’re interested in the work. That’s a big part of why I started painting on canvases, which is actually quite tricky. A canvas is a hard rectangle, which is the exact opposite of what I’d been doing up to that point. A city is all straight lines—squares and rectangles—and graffiti is meant to cross all of those lines and bring this organic shape. You can’t really do that on a canvas. Now I find that a lot of the lines I make on the canvas are inspired by architecture—the shapes of doorways and buildings—whereas before I was painting over them.”
Looking across the full scope of Costello’s work, one can more easily appreciate a technique refined to push up to the border of controlled chaos. His output is often described in broad terms as “drip paintings,” but within that categorization one finds pieces that evoke a range of natural and man-made elements—pouring rain, sparks flying off a blacksmith’s hammer, clouds, towering skyscrapers, and overgrown plants.
Back in his studio, Costello turns from his desk and gestures toward the canvases leaning behind him. “When I paint, I’m controlling everything, but I know it can be hard to realize that when you see the finished product. A lot of times the reaction can be, ‘Oh, you’re the drip guy,’ which is kind of one-note. Jackson Pollock’s paintings were also described as drip paintings—his nickname was Jack the Dripper—and I get that comparison a lot too. But Pollock painted on the floor, whereas I paint on vertical surfaces, so the way you need to control your material, and how it works its way into the canvas, is totally different. At the end of the day, I always end up doing stuff that’s drippy, fluid, or messy. I like letting my materials have some of their own say.”
For all the parallels between surfing and graffiti—style-obsessed, vernacular-rich subcultures driven by DIY experimentation to adapt to one’s environmental surroundings—Costello came to surfing mostly as a retreat from the urban sprawl where his work as an artist is anchored. “I love that in surfing there’s this international community you can call on and say, ‘Yo, I’m here. Do you know anyone? I’ll surf anything and meet you anywhere, anytime,’” he says. “Graffiti is like that too, but you really have to trust the people you’re linking up with. When I go somewhere to paint, I usually pad my schedule by a day to try to surf somewhere new.”
Costello met Christian Fletcher in Japan while detouring from an assignment in Tokyo, and he met Ellis Ericson in Bali after an assignment in Australia. Ericson has since stayed with Costello in Brooklyn when passing through the city.
“The first time I stayed with Craig was about a year and a half after we met in Bali,” Ericson says. “I shaped him this transition-era-inspired single-fin with a low rocker. I was young and still really hacking boards out at that point. When we went to surf, the waves couldn’t have been less suited to the board—seven-second-period, dumping beachbreak—but Craig was still just going for it. Whenever I stay with him, he’s shown me a side of the city that would have been very hard to drop into as a tourist.”
Since 2018, Costello has found a regular escape from the city on the south shore of Long Island, at his home in Bellport. “We have an occasionally fun beachbreak, but the sand shifts like crazy,” he says. “It was an epic hidden gem for four years after Hurricane Sandy blew a hole through Fire Island, but now it’s turned back into a thumping closeout. It can be a lot of work to find waves where I’m based, and you really need a boat, so most days I’m happy to just bodysurf the shorebreak. I’m not the kind of surfer who obsesses over it at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
I can appreciate why Costello feels this way. After three days of conversations with him, I find myself scanning the writing on every wall, mailbox, and bridge underpass with a heightened sense of attention, not unlike the mania one experiences as a surfer, scanning every bend in the coast to decipher some meaning that lies otherwise invisible to the untrained eye.
“People are generally oblivious to how much time goes into writing graffiti—the amount of time that goes into finding your spots and planning things out,” Costello says. “It’s the same with surfers who are up checking spots at five in the morning.”
The spots Costello obsessed over were not surf spots, but his obsession with them was not dissimilar. Surfing offered a blank canvas inalterable by human hands, an escape from one form of mania into another.
“To me, the appeal of surfing is that when you paddle out, you leave things behind,” Costello says. “You’re going to this place outside of everything else. You face the horizon.”
