Hit Shot Wall - a wet month!

All photos: NoLionsInEngland (HowAboutNo pretending there were no trains all month from the South Coast, that's 4 x 5 = 20 days working from home, yeah!)


February has been a month of unrelenting street art activity by street artists clad mainly in anoraks and wellington boots. Going to kick our look back this month, a month where the elements really tested the longevity of paper based art, with a sculptural slant.

Love Piepenbrinck placed several new fancy dress piggies out on the streets and has teased us with a photo on Facebook captioned “Most Hidden Piggy – almost impossible to even photograph”, which we haven’t seen hide nor hair of.


“Lay Off My Blue Suede Shoes”



Camouflage Piggy



Para Piggy

French street artists delight in showing us how it should be done, Nemi Uhu has placed a series of beautiful painted tiles on the Shoreditch streets.


Nemi Uhu


Another French artist who really got up on a lot of walls was Gregos, over in connection with the Vitry Ville Street Art book signing. He does these cast selfies, they supposedly show his emotional condition each day and a lot of the London ones are poking their tongue out at us, bloody French!


Gregos


One of the weirdest bit of street art we have seen in a long while is this space hopper stuck up in a tree by 616. Not so much referencing its context as totally subverting its environment, or perhaps is it actually meant to look like an oversize orange?


616


Alex Arnell believes in giving away street art and places hundreds of hand cut and painted paper butterflies on walls. With the volume of rain we had in the month of February, Alex seems to have decided that the last place butterflies would want to hang out is down the drains and here a flock seem to be fleeing out of a manhole.


Alex Arnell aka "Sell Out"


Without doubt one of the cleverest and most exciting things we have seen this month, perhaps this year, has been Borondo’s face by the canal on Hackney Wick, already drooled over on this Borondo Hits London Graffoto blog post.


Borondo

Dee One’s Heavenly Rejects have been a delightful presence on the Shoreditch streets for about a year, his minature pieces such as devils painted on acorns is often easy to pass by. One of his most pleasing and most difficult to spot is this aquatic scene.


Dee One


Don has been out painting the wall in February and we caught him in action one afternoon painting this girl cuddling her pet goat, once again Don comes up as about the most adventurous and detailed British stencil street artist active on outdoor walls.


Don


This skateboarder by Unify is defying the no skateboarding prohibition as all good skateboarders must, though if you look closely maybe not is all as it seems with the sign! With the mooted demise of the Undercroft at its current location, I wonder if Unify has dropped this one just outside the skatepark? It's begging for it.


Unify


Ben Slow created this portrait in support of Depaul, the message is don't let their story end on the street. http://www.depauluk.org/


Ben Slow


One of the most impressive and photogenic paintings in February was this little beauty by C215, over for a show (now closed) at StolenSpace.


C215

K-Guy has been busy on the streets recently, his original Tr*ash fag packet paste ups were a delight back in the early days of my love for street art and he has now revived them with this reflection on the latest health demon – high sugar levels in food.


K-Guy


Mr Cenz has also had a highly productive month painting letters and portraits, perish the presence of all the cars in this, errrr, car park.


Mr Cenz


I can’t be sure when Mobstr painted this stencil but I only found it February, so because I love the humour and the ironic fun at the expense of social media obsessed street art fans, it counts as February in my time-warped calendar.


Mobstr


Bit late this month and a bit rushed but fun as always.

London's Street Art 2013 - Nostalgia is so last year

They said it wouldn’t last and dammit they were right. The year turned out to be mortal, just 365 days long but attaching electrodes to 2013’s nipples, street artists cranked the generator handle to keep fresh work fizzing on the walls right to the very death. Let’s look back over the highlights, the brilliant walls, the teeny-weeny you’d-easily-miss-it fragments, the colours, the visiting international artists, the spats, the local artists who aren’t getting curated spots on permission mural walls, the REAL street art.

Words and photos: NoLionsInEngland


Street art is not a competition but Art Is Trash is 2013’s winner. Brash, colourful, inventive and at times downright lewd and crude, Art Is Trash turned his installations and painting into a performance. It was his ephemeral tragic bin bag characters and beasts that first caught our eye.


Art Is Trash


He then took the fight to fly posters (ok, I know street art is doomed to lose that battle) with some twisted subversions of the airbushed, cool and fulfilled characters targeting our needy and product deprived community.


Art Is Trash


His cure for tapeworm may face challenges getting medical certification.


Art Is Trash


One of the most beautiful campaigns was the soulful floppy eared characters who appeared on vintage music sheets and magazine pages courtesy of Midge, sometimes in stunning collaborations with My Dog Sighs.


Midge v. My Dog Sighs


On the subject of vintage paper, 616’s trespassing in abandoned buildings resulted in the liberation of found letters from a bygone pre-email era, he picked out underlined highlights from the text which formed the basis for multiple distortions of his characteristic tribal cartoon characters.


616 – “Monarch”


It has been a brilliant year for the highly promising ALO. His street work painted directly on the surface has won heaps of admirers and he is beginning to develop deserved traction in the gallery world.


ALO


The world is certainly a brighter place for the pop art paste ups of D7606. After coming to attention for persuading icons of femininity that piss smelling phone boxes were the place to be seen in 2013, he expanded the repertoire to embrace other forms of technologically challenged communication utilities such as post boxes, valve TVs and “Tardis” police phone boxes.


D7606 – (“yeah, Billy love, just go to the hotel and straight up to his room”)


D7606 proved himself to be an exceptional engine for artistic collaboration, inviting artists such as 616, C3, Gee Street Art and Benjamin Murphy to integrate their characters into his pop soaked retro world but as suckers for interaction between pieces of street art, the perhaps unplanned addition of a letter to the interface between Skeleton Cardboard and D7606’s post box tickled us most.


D7606 v. Skeleton Cardboard


Clet Abraham has been a frequent visitor in recent years though the vast majority of his traffic sign subversions from previous visits to London were “sign man” carrying a heavy beam. On his most recent visit late this year his interference with the authority's visual control signals demonstrated the full range of his witty and imaginative repertoire.


Clet Abraham



It would have been an incomplete year without the collaged brand-jacking of A.CE, he dutifully kept up a barrage of wheatpastes. Something unusual this year from A.CE was his "artist-cam" view of a night time bombing mission which captures the energy and “one man alone versus the city" of an intense illegal run, click A.CE: Inside The mind Of A Street Artist.


A.CE


The Horror Crew, Mr Fan in particular, has had a great year with work which challenges categorisation. The observant will see in addition to the gorgeous candy coloured pop imagery that the legs of the beast in the photograph below spell out HC FAN, defiantly blurring the boundary between street art and graffiti. Also, is this cool street art or a permissioned mural? Though we have chanced upon him painting this spot a couple of times in broad daylight without a care in the world, I am inclined to guess that Mr Fan has created these beautiful Koons hat tips without permission from the property owner. That supposition is supported by the absence of any camera crew documenting every squirt of paint and also the absence of any stencilled shouts to any mural organizers.


Mr Fan HC


Sometimes it’s the small and un-shouty street art that deserves greatest admiration, a piece that is clever, took some effort and doesn’t scream “I’m an artist, buy ME ME ME “. This metalwork bird by artist unknown is stunningly placed, beautifully executed and its installation is ingenious in a way you can only appreciate by finding it on the street, one of my favourites of the year.


Unknown


Something which seems quite commonplace in New York with their angle iron sign posts but which is rare in London is the metalwork tag. Artist “Three” from Singapore left this beautiful rusty tag on a wooden background of faded abstract spraypaint colours, a stunning and photogenic little piece which lasted quite a while.


Three


D*Face closed the old Stolenspace location with a spectacular solo show, reviewed here, which was accompanied by an epic mural next to Christchurch Spitalfields, beautifully juxtaposing the sins of the flesh and religious piety.


D*Face


In doing so, he provocatively went over a long running graffiti spot and to no one’s surprise, probably least of all D*Face’s, due response was delivered within days.


Graffiti v. Street Art


There is a long list of artists and pieces of work we want to include in this year’s annual review but in recognition of the attention span of our audience…and hello to anyone still reading this far…plus the fact that I may have figured out the technology for the first time, we are going to recognise the great contributions of some (not all) of those artists in a photo slide show.


Coming shortly will be part 2 of Graffoto’s review of the year 2013 in street art with emphasis on the larger and more spectacular work of visiting artists and muralists and anything we feel just should be mentioned even if only for being damn photogenic. Sign up for the Graffoto email or RSS and see ya shortly.

Hit Shot Walls March 2013

All photos: NoLionsInEngland

Not making any promises that this will become a regular feature but....here are some musings on and pics of street art and graffiti which happened to catch our eye around London recently.

Sweet Toof and Insect knocked up some gorgeous paste ups and papered a broad swath of London’s East End. Choosing photogenically distressed spots to get up, Sweet Toof went for a slightly less lurid pink version of his characteristic gums whilst Insect churned out a range of floppy eared mouse characters with colourful highlights, a reprise of a Hendrix zombie and a barcode coffin wake.








OBIT is on a roll and you can find his stickers and paste ups all over London but in the past week he took on the shutters on a well known bric-a-brac den on Brick Lane, his subject matter reflecting the three organs which come to most harm in Graffoto's obsession with the wondrous beauty of street art (and lavish art openings with free beer).


KGS, Allintha, Obey (modified),Obit


What was interesting to see was KGS getting the crew name high and loud in this street art central location, more power to them. In a world gone mural-loco with several organisations competing to pass permission slips into the hand of any visiting artist who is willing to play the mutual promotion painting game, illegal street art has really been marginalised over the past 18 months. Good to see people willing to grow a pair and get up high and illegal along this mural mile. Compare the above shot with the same spot just a few days earlier, noting by comparison KGS’s comedy modification of the Obey at the far end.


Kata, D7606/Gee Street Art, Unknown, Mobstr, Unga, Allintha, Obey


ACE’s London centric paste-ups have been a firm favourite with Graffoto for many years and despite hectic preps for a recent solo show in LA, ACE managed to add many prime specimens of his mashed up beauty to walls around London






Graffoto first came across Italian ALO one cold evening just over 2 years ago as he put up a few modest paste ups on his first outing to hit the streets of London. While his the energy of his vibrantly coloured portrait imagery was evident even on first sighting, he has recently been finding quiet spots to paint and paste in situ on larger scale to beguiling effect. This particular shot captures the chance moments that crop up as a photographer; with my non viewfinder eye open I could see this girl approaching and thought she’d add interest to the shot but I never imagined her lips, teeth and particularly the grey hat would so magically mirror ALO’s portrait, a lucky bonus. With slogans such as “Deceit”, “Loser” and “Frustration” juxtaposed with his female figures, we wonder if the young, male, Italian artist is allowing some biographical detail to influence his imagery.


ALO (modified/dogged by Endless)





We’re not sure if Kate hangs out in the East End but, avoiding the obvious gag with the juxtaposition of the two paste ups here, we like to think that our favourite screen printer Aida is reflecting on the post Olympics legacy with her modified message here.




Dee One has kept up a high output, I particularly liked this mashed up portrait of Cameron with Dee Devils for brains.


Dee One, D7606/Gee Street Art


The telephone boxes in the shot above started appearing in London late last year. Iconic females including Liz Taylor, Princess Diana, Audrey Hepburn, Barbara Windsor, Sam Fox and errr, Rhianna amongst others are trapped within pop art multiple telephone box paste ups (and the occasional tardis) that look lush on the street. The guy has his mojo and is rocking it hard. Collabs with street artists such as Gee Street Art and 616 seem to be his latest twist not to mention an increase in size as can be seen in the earlier shot of the Brick lane bric-a-brac cabin.




D7606/Gee Street Art, St8ment


Mentioning Gee Street Art, he/they have been among the hardest working street artists over the past winter. At the moment he is mostly making his mark with paste-ups though this multilayered stencil with its free hand reflection is just the way street art should be. He has also put on a street art show out in the provinces which opened this week, sadly we couldn’t make it.




616 doesn’t seem happy unless he has at least 1 new idea each week and recently it was a delight to find him putting up small captioned Polaroid collages, you don’t need permission and a 30 by 8 foot shutter to make an impact round here.






Last year the only 3 warm weeks we had outside the Olympic period were reserved for Jo Peel’s Holywell Lane stop motion mural. This year inside the Foundry Car Park she had to endure 3 weeks of finger freezing weather, hats off to anyone prepared to work outdoors high and hold cold cans for that length of time. We look forward to seeing the resulting stop motion this year, assuming camera operators’ shivers didn’t blur the photos.




Yesterday Graffoto had the pleasure of a couple of hours in the company of master snapper Art Of TheState. His un-erring eye sniffed out a couple of C215’s whose location we weren’t aware of, these are a couple of months old. Isn’t the year flying by.




This final flick is a piece found yesterday, no idea how old it is or who the creative genius was but it made us chuckle.




To those hardly souls undeterred by the brass monkey weather of the past few weeks, whose un-curated art has added beauty to London streets, we salute you!


Linkytron:

616

ACE
 Aida
ArtOfTheState flickr
ArtOfTheState website
C215 flickr
D7606 flickr
Jo Peel
Mobstr
Obey
Paul Insect 
Sweet Toof