Meet the street artist whose 'selfie portraits' line the walls of Snapchat HQ
Everyone from Andy Warhol and Nelson Mandela to Tina Fey and Daft Punk have earned a spot on the startup's walls.
But these aren't your typical stuffy portraits - in these paintings, completed in bright blues, reds, and yellows, each of the celebrities is shown through a cellphone screen, as if they were taking a selfie.
Aptly titled "Selfie Portraits," the works were done by local street artist ThankYouX just for Snapchat.
ThankYouX, whose given name is Ryan Wilson, met Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel in August 2013.
"Amy Powell at Paramount has an art piece of Steve Jobs in her office that I painted for her," Wilson told Business Insider.
"One of Evan's friends was having a meeting with Amy and they sent a snap of the art to him. Then I randomly got an email saying something like, 'We love your stuff and would love to meet you.'"
Spiegel invited him to check out the Snapchat office. The photo messaging startup was still based in its original beach house offices at the time.
"Evan gave me a tour of the place and we just hung out for about an hour talking about art, tech, music, etc.," Wilson said. "A few months later they moved to bigger offices and Evan asked if I would want to do art for the offices. From there they started growing more and getting more offices."
"I was lucky enough to grow with them and got to make art for the new spaces," he said.
Wilson has now done 13 pieces for Snapchat - 12 that were custom-made just for the office, and one Steve Jobs piece that Wilson made for Spiegel to honor the first time they met.
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"I loved using Snapchat, and now I love the people at Snapchat as well," he said. "It's insane to see how much this company has grown, and I'm honored to be a small piece of the story."
Wilson has been a figure on the Los Angeles street art scene since 2009. At first, most of his work were tags he did secretly late at night.
"After a few years and lot of sleepless nights I was able to quit my job and focus only on my art," he said. "It's still funny to me that by putting my art up illegally, I was able to make a career out it."
Though he does still do some street art, most of his work these days is for local galleries.
And Spiegel and Powell aren't his only big-name clients - he was also commissioned by Paul McCartney, who liked his piece so much he turned it into a lithograph for his tour.
Wilson has created an installation at the Sundance Film Festival, painted a car for Lexus, and worked with Sanrio on the Hello Kitty Art Show.
He's currently working on putting together a show that will premiere in Los Angeles in the late summer, as well as another that will be in Hong Kong in the fall.
He was also commissioned to do a mural for Skrillex's warehouse.
"I got to paint it while they were rehearsing for a huge tour, so I was pretty much watching the show over and over while painting," Wilson said.
As for his street art name, going by "ThankYouX" was largely unintentional.
"It started with some stenciled poster of Andy Warhol in 2009. I wrote 'thank you' on the posters and signed them with an anonymous 'X,'" Wilson said. "I was trying to pay tribute to a giant inspiration, and from that blogs started referring to me as 'ThankYouX.'"
Courtesy of ThankYouX
ThankYouX isn't the only artist whose work is on display at Snapchat. Spiegel also hired Wyatt Mills, a Los Angeles-based artist he knew from high school, to paint an enormous mural outside one of the buildings Snapchat leases in Venice.
"I took a tour of Snapchat and I noticed they had a lot of empty ones. Evan told me to pick one," Mills told Business Insider. "Snapchat is an app that captures a moment in time. This mural also captures someone abstractly."
Courtesy of Wyatt Mills
Internet companies and graffiti artists are starting to become a bit of a thing. Facebook famously compensated graffiti artist David Choe with about 3.77 million shares after he painted a set of murals at the company's first offices in Palo Alto. He made about $200 million when Facebook went public in 2012. Did Wilson get equity in fast-growing Snapchat, ahead of a potential IPO?The artist declined to say how he was compensated by Snapchat in exchange for his art.