Showing posts with label Eelus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eelus. Show all posts

Saturday 6 March 2010

Eelus - The Colour Out Of Space

Blackall Studios
73a Leonard Street
London

25 Feb – 6 March 2010


all photos: NoLionsInEngland except where stated



A few years back Eelus was a full time working guy making a valid contribution to society when along came street art to ram an exacto knife right through those wh-Eels. The release of Shat At through Pictures on Walls coupled with a street furniture sticker campaign at the same time as the street art rocket went stratospheric forced Eelus into the radar screens of forum bothering Banksy fans .




His most stunning outdoor piece is a version of his career defining Shat-At done in Bristol in collaboration with Xenz.


Eelus, Xenz


Although he says he has done very little in the past three years outdoors, that’s forgetting the Butterflies And Watching Eyes last year at Cargo, raven haired at One Foot In The Grove and modestly understating his contribution to the collaborative effort with Little Miss NoLions at Cans Festival in 2008.


Cans Festival 2008, photo Paulo_nine_o

Eelus’s influences come from an enduring fascination with astrology, UF-ology, heavy metal, science fiction and mythology. Among a set of strong new images shown for the first time is this super image based around a photo of a boy in the beach throwing stones at the sun transformed by the fragmenting arrival of a UFO, givng the picture its clever punning title.


We Come In Pieces


In Queen of Cydonia, Eelus touches on a UF-ologist’s pet conspiracy theory regarding extra-terrestrial architecture in the face on Mars and various pyramid structures held up as evidence of lost cities, intelligent life, they’re coming to get us, NASA is suppressing the truth.....run run run. Or a nice semi-mystical painting.


Queen of Cydonia


Eelus’s technique doesn’t allow for any shortcuts, from sketches or photos he works up the artwork on computer using a wackpad. The final result is printed out in its different layers, placed on stencil card and cut by hand. The wackpad allows Eelus to achieve the painterly effect evident for example Lung Mixture and in the arrows on We Are All In The Gutter, close inspection of the nicks and irregularities leave no doubt that the work is painstaking in the detail.


Lung Mixture Detail)


A pair of quite spectacular wall applied stencils are prepared in exactly the same way as the smaller canvasses. Eelus manages at the scale of the Icarus on the back wall to give a real sense of his wings disintegrating in the solar glare.


Icarus


Lilly Stay Put , sold lock stock and barrel “as is” off the wall, shows clearly the influence of Hipgnosis early 70s heavy metal album covers .


Lily Stay Put


Interestingly, in case anyone one suspects shortcuts such as projection techniques, a comparison of the Icarus wall painting with its small brother on canvas provides compelling differences in the detail, on the wall Eelus has even had to change the aspect of the wings to create a composition that fits properly within the wall and also to avoid a horrible boundary overlap between the wing and the body.


Icarus canvas


Eelus despises the crappy, crudely cut single-layer stencils that thankfully one sees less of on the streets these days, the time taken to create each of his stencil compositions is one of the reasons why he rarely works on outdoor walls these days.

It’s not often one sees urban art furniture so it is novel to find a solid mahogany relief carved chair presented to Eelus as a gift from someone from the East (honestly, the real East, not Hackney Wick).




A recently developed path evident in several pictures is the strong geometric pattern. These are developed in a progressive organic way by creating a stencil for on block, deciding what colour and shape to put next to that and so on, building up the final geometry by intuition and exploration rather than cutting a single layer for each colour. The effect is demonstrated well in Dress Up with the exploding disintegrating technicolour dream frock below and Queen Of Cydonia above.


Dress Up


A stand out piece is the striking and bold We Are All In The Gutter with its hints of glam and metal in the colours and details. Check out the arrows as mentioned earlier for real painterly stencil cutting. This painting follows on from a piece that Eelus did for the Green Day album as seen at the Stolen Space show last year.


We Are All In The Gutter


There are a few things which might be regarded as unfortunate, given that E is seemingly distancing himself from a street art niche which was never a comfortable pigeon hole for his art anyway. A couple of his compositions will remind anyone of Banksy’s NOLA, Eelus shifts uneasily at the similarity being pointed out but says that he had done the images before Banksy’s NOLA came out and had had reservations about including them in the show them for obvious reasons but had been persuaded.


Not Everything Is Black And White


No More Tears comes desperately close to flagrant flogging of a street art cliché in the angels wings though this is developed more from a reference to quasi religious images burned into the retina from childhood, it is hard to dismiss the impression that the bodily secretion looks more like drool than tears.


No More Tears


Downstairs is a retrospective of many of Eelus’s signature pieces, though Raven Haired is, if one recalls correctly, absent.


Retro Eelus

The show highlights the strengthening of Eelus’ palette and a growing development of his signature themes. Eelus has managed to maintain a "two steps forward, one step back" kind of prgoress so its good to see this outing as signifying a great leap forward. This self organised show superbly demonstrates his mastery of the stencil form, is thoroughly pleasing to the eye and by common consent at the launch exceeds the expectations of most of the cliché weary street art fetishists. As a bonus, it is refreshing to see the carcass of The Leonard Street Gallery, that former eye at the centre of London's street art storm, being resurrected by good art and a great opening night crowd.

Apologies for writing this so late in the show’s run but you read this shit so you don’t have to go, don’t you?

More pictures from the show here .

Wednesday 7 May 2008

Banksy, No Lions, Eelus Group Show

Or Cans Festival: you created a monster


Words: NoLionsInEngland; pictures NoLions, Howaboutno 



Foreword - Cans Festival (the bits that make sense of where this post is coming from):
Cans Festival - the first preview night visit
Cans Festival - Let Us Spray - what went on in Banksy's pet project, the public access spray zone


The gauntlet was thrown down. Cans Festival includes a come-one-come-all stencil participation event and…well, you can’t get onto the "rock up and spray" ramp unless you are going to do some art.

Brooding about this on Sunday night, I wondered how the heck I could get onto that ramp to photograph some of the awesome shit being thrown up on the un-scripted walls. Monday morning had held promise of a lie-in as it was a bank holiday but a bolt of lightening hit the NoLions boudoir in the night – to get on that ramp I've just got to somehow discover the hidden artist within.

What image though? First thought was keep it small and simple, an animal silhouette, perhaps a butterfly but oh bugger hasn’t that been done to death by Messrs Evil and Walker already. Maybe a Leopard, but you couldn’t compete with Bansky’s Tag Leopard in the show. Then slowly slowly the penny dropped – how about a Lion based image.



Banksy

The story behind the name No Lions In England is that lyrical wizard Ian Brown, previously lead singer in the Stone Roses, subsequently multiple album releasing god-like genius and also long standing street art aficionado many years ago was in a group panel discussion on TV when a demonised rasta man leaps up and started loundly querying where has the lions on the England badge came from as there had never been any lions in England. Ian Brown went on to record the track No Lions In England with a thumping bass line so low the bass strings must hang somewhere down near the guitarist's ankles.

Having adopted the NoLionsInEngland monikor about 4 years ago, it seemed a good idea to create an image involving the three lions of the England football badge and add red crosses through them.

After breakfast, an image of the badge was found on the net, tidied up, transferred to the inside of the conrnflakes packet and luckily having an unused set of Stanley knive blades, the lion stencil was born. The cross was simple, and my daughter drew the words.




We checked in at Cans Festival reception,
“you got a stencil?”
“yup”
“you got cans?”
“errrrrr”

Some marshall guy allocating spaces comes over and takes us past the Colditz barrier separating the rock-up-and-spray talent from the rubber-neckers and suggests we slap ours under the Eelus tag. He then got us the black and the red sprays. The wall was as rough as a badgers rear end and as grubby as an ant-eaters breakfast so our new friend gets us some white to prep with. This guy, dark top heavy mop of curly hair if that helps, may work for PoW though we hadn’t met before and credit to him, he couldn’t have been more encouraging and helpful – we salute you.

Ably assisted by the young Little Miss No Lions, 5 minutes later we have both wielded a spray can for the first time ever and suddenly – this stencilling thing works!





And we were able to get close up pics of all the other un-billed genius’ art on that ramp - mission accomplished! Pictures of the have-a-go hereos work are here, and a description of the fun is in an earlier blog entry "Let Us Spray".









One thing the experience lacked was any kind of tension.  It was legal, authorised and totally lacking that key element of graffiti – the danger of being caught. Why stop there? Realising that stencils can be re-used and with blog compadre HowAboutNo confessing to having a stencil of his own ready to go, a couple of pints of Guiness was all it took to generate sufficient dutch courage to have a go on the streets.





How can we avoid standing out like spare pricks in Shoreditch at home time on a Wednesday evening? That’s easy, a pair of chinos, a pink shirt, cufflinks, 20 marlboro. We almost faded into the walls.

3 pints of Guinness and 30 minutes pass, and next thing several walls in Shoreditch appear to be ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly more vandalised than before. It seems a sort of very polite dis-obedience.





The Krah vs NoLionsInEngland vs CarTrain!
 

Tomorrow, we may return to the scene of the crime to get some snaps of our handiwork which we may add to this blurb.

Did it work? Tonight’s mindless wall daubing is a minuscule vindication of what the organisers of Cans Festival set out to achieve, to spread wider the use of the spray can and stencil as a means of public expression, to unleash the un-suspected and hidden talent in us all. We like to believe that this is being repeated up and down the country and the seeds sown last weekend at Cans will flourish over the coming years.






POST SCRIPT:

Cans Festival proved to be something Graffoto had to devote far more than this post to, here is the full set of related posts:

Cans Festival - the first preview night visit
Cans Festival - Let Us Spray - what went on in Banksy's pet project, the public access spray zone
Banksy, No Lions, Eelus Group Show - Banksy wanted anyone apart from artists to take up stencilling, we accepted the challenge
Cans Festival - One More Sniff - How the Cans wall art evolved in the first month or so after the event
Cans Recycled - First Peek - An un-scheduled sneak peek at the second version of Cans Festival when the tunnel was closed for a few days.
Cans Recycled Opens - Like it says on the tin
Alphabet Soup - The Cans 2 Letter Hunt - A Rarekind of letter game played at Cans Recycled
Cans2 Recycled Revisited - more.

Saturday 29 March 2008

Cless, Dan Malone, Dropmedia, Eelus, Gauche, Majowski, Mike Egan, Sebograficos, Twugraphic

Cement Gallery Group Show 27 Mar – 5 Apr

One of the first victims of the build-em-up-knock-em-down pump and dump street art print scene was Eelus, slagged off for knocking out large editions of the one image in too many colourways. No longer on the PoW roster having chosen to go full time and sell via his own website, Eelus has broken cover to participate in a mate’s group show.

Two notable performances to report. Mike Egan among his other talents is an embalmer. His art has a determined focus on death with abundant bleeding skeletons as ghoulish dead beings rather than just dead bodies. The style echoes Mexican El Día de los Muertos (day of the dead) iconography and calls to mind the Date Farmers as seen in London’s Leonard Street Gallery last year. Egan’s corner here includes half a dozen 12” square heavily lacquered death related pieces on wood, a trio of similar framed giclee editons plus a trio of very attractive errrrrrrrrrrrrrr..skull and coffin decks.


Mike Egan


Mike Egan – 4 Coffins To Bury


Dropmedia turns out to be a graphic designer and curator. Large stark rectilinear montages on canvasses feature sub-scale silhouetted men striding around or off the canvas edges dwarfed by dramatic and alarmingly red and black collaged objects. These semi abstract, original pieces are quite stunning.


Dropmedia



Back to Eelus, the newest image is his most intriguing and clever. A boy on a barren moonscape is growing some kind of crystal, or perhaps another planet on a canvas?


Eelus



Also showing well is the 4 colour spraypaint on wood Raven Haired though this is going down the girl with big hair with stuff in it route mapped out by others including Luc Price and David Choe, who both incorporate way more texture and detail in the bouffant region. Perhaps Eelus has long hair and this captures how he feels about it in the morning?


Eelus – Raven Haired


The rest of Eelus’s images have been seen before on his website, and the interweaving of the Jawa eyed skeleton gazelle walker with the rear end of the skeleton remains baffling even close up.


If naked breasts is your thing and lets face it for about 50% of the population that’s probably the case, then Cless can do something for you.


Cless: Horny – Only God Can Help Me


Majowski’s Eya is a beautiful evocation of a sun drenched urchin girl with a heavy Astec Mexican nest of hair fringing her eyes


Majowski - Eya


Dan Malone must have an audience amongst a certain cadre of bedroom geeks but too much of the stuff looks like the sub-manga computer game imagery churned out by the ton.pixel.megabyte load in keyboard sweatshops the world over.


Dan Malone – Youth 1 Red

Twugraphic goes the easy and ultimately sterile route of blemish and concept free laserprints mixing dangerous things like guns and chainsaws with crapping birds. It is easy to see the contrast but not the point.


Twugraphic


Also present, Gauche. Lush solid colours and predatory females..


Gauche – Black Widow


There is definitely enough exciting fresh stuff to make this show worth visiting though be warned that the majority of the work is shown in the soulless giclee form.


Lots more pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11928372@N04/sets/72157604295296440/