Painted Rooms:  Eric Orr

When Eric Orr was rejected for the art high school he hoped to attend in the Bronx, he studied carpentry instead. One year into his apprenticeship, he won a visual arts scholarship to the Art Students League, and his graphic career began.

I'm blessed, Orr says about his leapfrogging destinies. I'm glad I was able to learn the common aspects of being an artist. In order to eat you must be able to do other things. Now, I can capture a likeness like nobody's business, but I can also create an album cover or do a logo like nobody's business.

A contemporary of Keith Haring and Basquiat, whom he says he likely passed in the halls, Orr was among the originators of icon graffiti. He refers to his signature robot head—which appeared on walls during the same era as Haring's radiant baby and Basquiat's dancing dog—as being like Prince and his name.

But just as it was in the beginning, Orr's current work combines the conceptual and the practical. Since the seventies, he has lived in Georgia, where he met some good people, ran with some sports figures, and did faux-finishes and murals in players' homes. Orr was equally likely to do portraits of pro basketball players' kids as he was to design their swimming pools.

School did pay off, Orr says.

Now I'm comfortable, and it's a good thing. If you stop, you might fall backwards. You've got to keep going. If I got to the level of success of Basquiat and Keith, I would have burnt out.

Orr particularly admires the career of Futura 2000, who started way back in the seventies. Recently touring with hip-hop crews, he links his icon art with that genre's pop cultural force.

We went on tour with Lord Finesse, and heard a commercial they made for Suzuki. We thought, 'Wow! Hip-Hop is so huge!' We go to Amsterdam and they take it so seriously, those cats. They study this stuff. You can name it what you want: street art, graffiti art, hip hop. It's all going to be around for a long, long time.

I'm proud to be a part of something that has changed the world as we know it, Orr says.

In the room, I picked the color palette because it's soft and subtle, he says. If someone's been drinking the night before, they have a room that is nice and subtle, not in-your-face. The fade effect [another technique that Orr performs professionally] is wrapped around the walls. The room is part interior design, part art world.