The artists' artist: street artists

Blek Le Rat on Richard Hambleton

I first became aware of Hambleton's work in Naples in 1984. He doesn't use spray cans: he uses brushes and black paint in pots to create immense human shadows, which can be up to 250cm tall. His highly stylised mixture of drips, strokes and splashes makes for extremely powerful silhouettes. All his characters emanate an energy that only a grand artist can create. Canadian-born Hambleton – notorious for 30 years now, having worked in cities all over the world – often paints his shadowmen in rather dark, if not rotten, places such as car parks: hidden nooks and crannies where they can surprise passersby.

Hambleton, who now lives in New York, is the only painter whose work I have ever bought. But money and fame are not his priority. His ambition is to show and to share art in the urban landscape.

Blek Le Rat is a stencil art pioneer who works in Paris.

Aiko on Miss Tic

There are few female voices in the world of street art, but some women shout really hard and loud. Miss Tic, one of the "stencil legends", has been bringing short words and sensual images to the streets of Paris since the mid-1980s. Her works tell stories of her own experiences intimately and sometimes painfully. They can be romantic and provocative – and they always inspire me to be wilder, louder and bolder.

I learned about Miss Tic in the mid-2000s, right after I left the Faile collective in Brooklyn, New York, to go solo. The few women who are in the game there rarely manage to stay hot for as long. It was great to know there was someone I could look up to. Her seductive stencilled women and accompanying words are well known in Europe. Unfortunately, the poems, which are her strongest weapons [often commenting on the role of women in society], aren't translated into other languages, but this only makes her, and her art, more mysterious.

Aiko was born in Tokyo and is based in New York.

Sickboy on La Mano

La Mano means the hand. I saw his work in 2000 when I went to Barcelona and it was a pivotal point in my graffiti. His graphic depictions of a hand were everywhere. At the time, graffiti was mainly seen as letter-based, but he just used a logo and repeated it. He would draw a fat, cartoonish hand in cream with a black outline, and it would be everywhere you went. It ended up embedded in your subconscious. The hand could be really big, going over two buildings; or really small, on a doorway; or he'd use several sizes, intertwining.

I'd never been a big fan of stencil work, which is where a lot of people think graffiti crosses over into more acceptable street art. La Mano stuck more closely to the graffiti aspect, which I try to adhere to now. I like the freehand, grab-a-tin-of-spray-paint approach. I came back from that holiday in Barcelona inspired, with a whole new outlook, and I now use a temple logo in my art.

Sickboy is based in London.

The Faile collective on Bäst

We first came across Bäst's work on the streets of Manhattan in 1998. There was something so alive about his art, and the fact that he worked in a variety of media, that really set it apart. Bäst's combinations and appropriation of pop culture were refreshing and raw. Older pieces like Molotov Dwarf – a man with the head of a Disney dwarf, holding a molotov cocktail – instilled the same kind of emotional contrast through image-pairing. He has an ability to deconstruct mass media in a way that is dirty and violent, yet beautiful and sincere.

His studio work has evolved in an equally compelling direction. Botulism, at London's Lazarides Gallery last year, featured collages of images and advertising, giving the impression of an ever-expanding, media-driven bacteria. The relationship between street and studio is important: Bäst is just as energetic at 2am in an alleyway as he is on the wall of a gallery.

Faile is a New York street art collective, formed in 1999.

Swoon on Revs

I had just moved to New York and was becoming curious about graffiti, but I had this stereotypical idea of what it was. When a friend pointed out some roller pieces [made with paint rollers], I remember thinking: "Oh my God!" They were such a part of the landscape I thought they were advertising. To learn they weren't, that they were illicit works, flipped my brain.

Revs's constant focus on the city has become part of its fabric. But his stand-out project is the one in which he wrote his life story, a page at a time, through the tunnels of the New York subway. He would roller out white paint and spray paint black letters on top. It's such a heartfelt, intense work: to spend that much time in the tunnels, to chronicle your life in a place few people will ever read it, is strange and beautiful.

When the train stops in a tunnel, as it often does, or goes really slowly, you can sometimes catch glimpses of the pages. Revs has created a permanent, but hidden, part of the city. When you discover it, you feel you have really stumbled upon something.

Swoon, based in New York, creates life-size cut-outs pasted to city streets.