Wayne Roberts, who has died aged 61, adapted the stick figure from the Roger Moore series The Saint to become one of the worlds most celebrated or, depending on your point of view, notorious exponents of graffiti.
As Stay High 149, Roberts was famous for crafting his pseudonym into a painted signature, or tag, that incorporated a subverted version of The Saints cartoon icon. When graffiti erupted to cover almost every conceivable surface in New York in the early 1970s, it was Stay High 149 whose tag stood out.
---
What a quintessential marriage of cool and style, wrote Norman Mailer, in his 1973 book The Faith of Graffiti, to write your name in giant separate living letters, large as animals, lithe as snakes, and to do it in a winter night when the hands are frozen and only the heart is hot with fear. No wonder the best of the graffiti writers, those mountains of heavy masterpiece production, [such as] Stay High, get the respect, call it the glory, that they are known, famous and luminous as a rock star.
---
