Budha Tomi – Budapest street artist
By Joel Alas, B EAST Editor
Like a twisted comic strip, or sketchbook doodles come to life, Budha Tomi’s illustrations crawl up walls and writhe across paper.
Budha Tomi is one of Budapest’s best emerging artists. He is at the fore of the city’s first generation of conceptual graffiti artists who have taken their form beyond juvenile street scrawling.
Though his art looks playful, Tomi is all about work. He studies five days a week at Budapest’s art academy, and in his spare time he paints, draws, and curates bodies of work. He doesn’t shy away from commercial opportunities, participating in several cross-over marketing campaigns. 
He drinks only red wine, and only a glass a sitting.
“He’s an amazingly hard worker. I can’t believe how much he does. Other artists talk a lot about projects, but he actually does them,” says Claudia Martins of Printa gallery-café-botique, where Tomi’s work is featured heavily.
Tomi loves to work in print. He publishes his own newspaper-style magazines, printing on cheap low-stock paper in black and white, in true Samizdat style. But lately he has become interested in a back-to-nature approach, etching on trees in forests and old brickwork in countryside buildings.
Tomi’s gallery space is a behind a graffitied shutter door 
on one of the many decaying streets of District VII, the Jewish District. It’s a tiny split-level room. Downstairs is where he paints, using canvas as his preferred medium. Up a steep set of stairs is where he stores the paintings, resting them against shelves full of old boxes. He opens one of the boxes to show us its contents – giant amber bottles of perfume.
Tomi’s studio is actually a storage space for a perfume importer who generously allows him to share the location.
We visit another studio space directly across the street. This one is occupied by Gabor Pinter, a painter who creates large canvas images with thick and full brushstrokes that create a blurring effect.
Gabor’s workshop is a huge vacated two-floor lobby, with a mezzanine level balcony overlooking the ground floor. He tells us it was once a “Jewish casino”. The building owner has allowed him to use the space while it awaits an unscheduled renovation. Until then, there is no power or heat in the building.
Gabor shows us his canvases in a pitch black room. I take a flash picture of each painting, then view them through the digital display. It’s a strange yet original form of exhibition.
Gabor and Tomi embody the opportunistic and motivated spirit of young creatives in Budapest, who are using the current pause in the development of their city to push ahead with their own vision of the future.
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