In “Star Wars: A New Hope”, Jedi Knight Obi Wan Kenobi explains to Luke Skywalker that “the lightsaber was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.” Art too is an elegant weapon and graffiti is an expression of the pure energy that weapon can contain. Street art is a living, breathing organic mirror of our times.

Last week The Spirit took notice of a wall in South Kensington tagged with Star Wars-themed artwork. Next to the Kylo Ren caricature on the right side of the wall white letters denote that the piece is “A Cash & Busta Collaboration.” Who are Cash and Busta (pronounced Boo-sta)? The Spirit met up with these artists to figure out how they met and why they chose to pay homage to that “Galaxy Far, Far Away.”

Neither Cash nor Busta are native to Philadelphia, but their paths crossed and led both men to the wall on 5th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue — an intersection that is home to one of the few ‘free’ walls in Philadelphia where street artists can openly work. It is free because artists have built a relationship with the owner. All he asks is that the artists clean up after themselves and respect the space.

Cash first started painting at the 5th and Cecil wall last June and when he first arrived he had the entire space to himself. But one day he showed up at the wall only to find that another artist — Busta — had painted over his piece. Cash wasn’t mad — in fact, he thought the graffiti was good.

“There was no animosity,” he said. “I respected his work.”

Busta, originally from Colombia, is younger than Cash. He is scrawny, has scraggly facial hair, kind eyes and a sly, knowing grin. He painted over Cash’s original piece because there wasn’t anything cohesive painted there.

“[But] when I came back I saw that Cash painted over [my work],” Busta told Spirit News. “It’s not a competition, it’s friendly, instead of just tags I want to put up a good piece. If you’re going to paint over something, make it better, you know, improve the wall.”

A year ago Busta decided to make Philly his home. “I wanted to come [here] because it’s the actual place where graffiti was born. For me it’s the history,” he said. “I need to start from the beginning. My thing is never forget the past because by studying the past it will always bring you something new… for me being here is learning.”

That’s right, folks: Philadelphia is internationally recognized as the birthplace of graffiti. In 1968 an artist named Darryl McCray AKA Cornbread started tagging his name all over Brewerytown. The artist’s infamy reached it’s peak after an incident involving the death of a gang member named “Corn” led local papers to mistakenly report that “Cornbread” the graffiti artist was killed due to gang-related violence. Cornbread wanted to make a statement and prove that he was still alive, so he broke into the Philadelphia Zoo and tagged “Cornbread Lives” on the side of an elephant. Newspapers around the country picked up this bizarre story and the modern graffiti movement was born.

The Anti-Graffiti Network was founded in 1984 by Mayor Wilson Goode as a measure to stop the inner-city youth from tagging in Philadelphia. Cornbread was hired by the mayor to advise the Network. Eventually this program developed into what we now know today as The Mural Arts Program, the largest public art program in the United States.

Cash and Busta aren’t working with Mural Arts on their Star Wars piece, but the influence of Philly’s public art history is innate in their work.

“Philly style, the influence from Philly is Philly,” Busta said.

Cash is in his early 40s. He is stocky, like a football player. He sports a five o’clock shadow and paints with diligence and intensity. He spent the last 20 years working in NYC in high-end fashion. He hated it.

“Nobody worries about fashion anymore, everybody just wears jeans and a tee,” he said. Now Cash is out of retirement and painting again. While he was in New York he kept an eye on the scene and was always paying attention to the tags and trends around the city.

Cash went through a tough divorce last year, followed by a deep depression. He was very upfront that art is what saved him. Watching him work, you can see that he is passionate about his craft. “Sometimes I’m painting for eight or nine hours and I don’t feel a thing, it’s calming to me. It’s a healing thing that happens.”

Cash’s return to graffiti has a punk rock edge to it. He wants to get back to being “raw,” as he described it. He thinks that kids these days go into art without understanding their roots and the artists who blazed the trail before them. “It’s the whole thing, art, pick a genre, whether it’s graffiti, music, breakdancing — it’s something inner city kids always took from something else. Harking back to the 70s and 80s whether it’s a guitar riff from [Led] Zeppelin or a hip-hop sample from a soul record, we all followed a format and now I’m still following that same format.”

The two artists, Cash and Busta, are students of history and they are here to leave their mark. They went back and forth several times painting over each other’s artwork. Connecting through Instagram Cash asked Busta, “I’m going to do a production of Star Wars. Want to come paint with me?

Coincidentally Busta has snapped some photos in NYC a few months earlier at the LEGO store, specifically of the Star Wars characters on display. “I liked their colors and the positions of the lines,” Busta said. “I knew I was going to do something with [Star Wars].”

The left side of the Star Wars wall in South Kensington is Busta’s. His name (or tag) lies in the center flanked by Darth Vader on the left and Yoda on the right. These two old-school characters (first introduced to the series in the 70s and 80s) are surrounding the artist’s name, which is intentionally written in a highly-stylized, contemporary style with elongated letters and stretched lines.

Conversely, on the right hand side of the wall, Cash depicts Kylo Ren and Finn, two new characters debuting in the soon-to-be released “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”. The characters stand on either side of Cash’s tag, which is written in the block letter-style that was prevalent in 80s graffiti. There’s a visual mixing of styles and themes in this collaboration and it’s much deeper than Star Wars fan art.

“When I hear that sound of the lightsaber it takes me back to 1977 when I was five. I hear that sound and I get ignited,” Cash said. “I relived that passion with my kids when The Phantom Menace came out in 1999 and now I get to put that creativity into my art.”

The duo plan on doing more collaborations together. Cash is traveling to Miami and San Francisco in the near future to explore their graffiti scenes and work on new pieces. Busta is working on finding a Fishtown location for his next piece. You can follow their work on their instagram accounts. Their handles are @gclarkart and @busta.art respectively.