Chris “Daze” Ellis. Dazeworld. The Artwork of Chris “Daze” Ellis

Dazeworld. The Artwork of Chris “Daze” Ellis. Chris “Daze” Ellis. 2016

Daze’s world has always been kinetic—its energy drawn from the tracks, tunnels, and streets that once defined New York City’s pulse. Dazeworld: The Artwork of Chris “Daze” Ellis captures that charge across four decades of work, documenting his evolution from teenage train writer to established painter and mentor. Published by Schiffer, the 168-page monograph gathers over 250 photographs—many previously unseen—that chart an artist moving between public space and private reflection.

In these pages, Daze’s early graffiti runs again across the MTA’s rolling stock, documented by Martha Cooper and others who witnessed the golden age firsthand. Those images, raw and archival, sit beside luminous canvases and murals that reveal a mature painter unafraid of introspection. As Daze writes in his introduction, this is not an autobiography in the literal sense but a guided journey through formative moments – “the seminal points that shaped my art and allowed me to continue to evolve as an artist.”

The book’s structure mirrors that statement: from Graffiti High and the camaraderie of Art & Design’s 1970s hallways, through early gallery experiments with Haring and Basquiat, to later murals in São Paulo, Paris, and New York. Jay “J.SON” Edlin’s essay “Transit(ion)” connects these phases with precision, tracing the artist’s movement from spray-painted steel to stretched canvas—a shift both risky and inevitable. Claire Schwartz’s “From City as Canvas to Canvas as City” frames Daze’s studio practice as a dialogue with the metropolis itself, where composition replaces commotion and paint replaces train schedules.

What emerges is a portrait of an artist grounded in continuity rather than rupture. Even as he traded tunnels for studios, Daze’s work retained the rhythm of the city—its density, its noise, its collisions. His colors still hum with fluorescent light; his figures, whether commuters or dreamers, carry the same quiet urgency. Sacha Jenkins’ foreword situates this trajectory within a broader lineage of New York graffiti, reminding readers that survival and reinvention are often brothers.

Readers can witness the transitions here: photographs of collaborative walls with Crash, Skeme, and Dez; classroom scenes where Daze teaches new generations to see painting as an act of translation rather than departure. His world remains porous—personal history, a collective horizon.

Like the city that raised him, Daze has never been static. Dazeworld feels less like a retrospective than an open-ended map in motion: trains and canvases as coordinates, tracing tracks of the persistence of one determined artist and one of NYC’s original train writers.

Text Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo   Fotos Eveline Wilson