As we celebrate our 10th Anniversary of the Wooster Collective website, we asked a group of artists who we showcased in the beginnings of the website the following question:

What's the one thing that you learned in the last decade that you had wished someone had told you 10 years ago?

The following response comes from Eltono:

10 years ago, I would love to have been told that I should note down all the details of every painting I was doing. Looking back, I now realize how useful a more thorough documentation of each one of them would have been, including the stages leading up to their disappearance. Nowadays, digital photography automatically records the date, hour and even GPS position where a picture was taken. When I stopped writing graffiti and started painting my first abstract geometric pieces, back in 2000 in Madrid, I was still using a film camera. I always took photographs but often lost some of the information (such as where and when) that is valuable to me now and that I can no longer recover. 10 years later, I wish I had more details about these early paintings and was able to categorize them to help maintain an extensive catalog of all of my paintings. 

Apart from that, something I would never have believed if someone told it to me 10 years ago is that an art form based on subversive illegal street interventions would, a decade after, embrace pop culture and become mainstream. I would have never imagined I would be able to see so many celebrity portraits painted on canvas and shown in art galleries exhibiting street art. We started filling dirty markers with bizarre ink mixtures and hiding hours in dark filthy streets waiting for a train to end up painting popular icons on canvas? I must be misunderstanding something. For me street art is not a graphic art form, it's a conceptual art form – one which must provide a reciprocal relationship between the artists and their environment.