Roa (Born 1976) is a graffiti artist from Ghent, Belgium. He generally paints urban/wild birds and animals that are native to the area he is painting. He has created works on the streets of cities across the United States, Europe, New Zealand and Australia. Roa usually uses a minimal color pallet, such as red, black, and white but creates works using vibrant colors depicting internal systems and/or flesh within the birds and animals. His preferred forms of methods of painting are by using acrylic paint or spray paint. In fact, most of Roa’s works are created through a mixture of white, gray scale and black colors. At times, he prefers to sketch, especially those large murals.
Roa remembers that while he was still very young, he wanted to be an archaeologist or something adventurous and he used to collect little skulls from birds and rodents that he would then draw home. Growing up in the eighties, he was naturally inspired by the American life; skating, music and so forth. He began his artistic career by paining warehouses and buildings in his hometown. Today, his distinctive black and white style street artwork can found in many art galleries, museums, and homes worldwide. In 2011, Roa painted a mural in Ehrenfeld at Senefelderstrasse and participated in the Cologne CityLeaks Festival. In 2012, he took part in a street art festival in Bristol known as the See No Evil, where he created a fox two-storey high on the side of a building. In 2014, he visited Dunedin and painted a tuatara mural on a building on Bath Street.
