Diggin In The Archives Pt 8

This week in spite of the latest official guidance to follow unofficial interpretations of the law, there have been no trips to Durham. I have followed my instinct to remain at home to see what scum is floating on the surface of the street art photography archive.

Ludo first put his art on London streets in 2009 and right from the off his Nature’s Revenge project dealt with man vs nature, weaponry, deception and death. Ludo’s work always had scale and awesome eye-catching placement. This weaponised orchid dates from 2011.


Ludo, 2011


Street artist and gallerist Rae visited London in 2013 and left an impressive range of paste ups, stickers, painted surfaces and this wacky sculpture which lasted all of 24 hours.


Rae, 2013



Rae, 2013


The Battle Of Fashion St pitted Ronzo’s monster, looking very much exactly like a medical diagram of a virus against studio stablemate Conor Harrington’s faceless soldier. Like most of Conor’s art this one lasted a long time.


The battle Of Fashion St, Ronzo and Conor Harrington, 2011


Graff snapping mate for many years Joe Epstein aka LDN Graffiti, author of street art book “London Graffiti and Street Art” has teamed up with 9 great street artists to raise funds for Great Ormond St Hospital. Each artist has created a special version of the book by hand painting the cover, so that’s 9 unique versions of the book.




For more images, details and a link to how to support the fund raiser and maybe win one of these fantastic prizes in the LDN GOSH Charity Lottery, click here


One of the featured artists in the LDN GOSH fundraiser is Pure Evil, he doesn’t so much redecorate the book cover as subject it to extreme abuse and reconfiguration, it’s bonkers but brilliant. In 2012 Pure Evil imagined the Hackney Olympics looting squad making off with some Olympics booty, as seen on this Redchurch Street shutter.


Pure Evil 2012



Pure Evil's LDN GOSH Charity Book


In the happy days when I had a kind of job thing, I did one of my Street Art Photography Workshops in Hackney. I only found out this week thanks to Inspiring City’s Art Related Noise podcast interview that this stencil piece is “Lee P” by Findac. Lee P is otherwise known as street artist Eelus. The second shot was the idea of the photo - to show what Lee P was looking at


Findac, 2013



Findac, 2013


More than a decade of pasting up street art has left no doubt that Donk has an awesome approach to impressive installations created from his own original photos. It would be very easy to dredge up one of Donk’s huge crowd pleaser paste up images like the Fashion St fence (with the tassels), the Willow Street horse facing POW or the ghetto blaster on Sclater St but with no slight on any of those, sometimes his montages of smaller images show his versatility better. From 2013 this is a selection of hand finished unique Humble Magnificent and B Brave Indian images featuring Donk jr as model. Donk’s paste up’s typically decayed beautifully.


Donk 2013


Claudia Walde aka MadC is a graffiti writer and book author. She is also another of the artists to have created a unique painting on a book being auctioned to raised funds for Great Ormond St Hospital, details as above.


In culture with such a huge gender imbalance MadC is a rare example of an internationally regarded graffiti writer. In 2011 the Pure Evil Gallery hosted MadC’s first solo exhibition and graffiti writers came from all over to check out her top notch can skills and brilliant colour palette. Her 2013 abstract mural on Chance St in Shoreditch is well known and still running. Less known perhaps is this stunning 2011 graffiti on the old Micawber St launderette, look closely and you can pick out her name in there. It was huge though this is nowhere near the biggest piece of graffiti MadC ever did.


MadC, 2011



Mad C LDN Graffiti book cover


If you are interested in seeing previous DITAs, you can start with the first weekly compilation of the daily DITA uploads of HERE,

Art credits and links are by each photo. All photos: Dave Stuart

Ludo, Len and How Street Art Connects

Caution: regular readers may be shocked to find references to the real world in what follows.


Since his street art first appeared on London’s walls in 2008, Ludo’s paste ups have been a frequent delight around London. His dark and occasionally surreal vision sees nature take up arms, what at first glimpse may look like an exotic plant or insect species on close inspection reveals a sinister hybrid organic techo-weaponry.


2010



2010


There is a genuine integrity to Ludo’s pieces, they are generally put up without permission after a bit of a wander to find just the right spot, they involve a bit of pasting and a bit of paint flinging, he finds the spots himself and often he locates virgin walls previously undefiled by street art.   The additions are not always to the immediate delight of the property owner, as street art should be.


2011


Ludo was back in London last week and as usual put up some stunning original paste ups. Locating the first piece was relatively easy as in the early photos (hat tip GS-L Studio) that appeared online a business name was visible.


2017


Unbeknown to Ludo, the business proprietor found a very direct personal connection to Ludo’s new artwork on his wall. The business is JC Motors in Haggerston, owned by Len Maloney. JC Motors has been housed in a railway arch under the East London line for the past decade. The property owner is Transport For London who has demanded massive rent increases from JC Motors and many other businesses who call the railway arches home. TfL’s massive rent increases are evidently fuelled by the almost implausible idea that these grimy unfashionably hardworking and hardwearing backstreet locations must be elevated by vague proximity to trendy coffee shops and the City of London’s halls of capitalism.

At the same time, small businesses in Hackney are also facing huge increases in business rates.  Earlier this year Len was one of a delegation from the  East London Trades Guild who presented a petition to Downing Street on behalf of business owners across East London who face extinction.


Len Maloney, Paul Gardner et al, No. 10 Downing St, March 2017. photo copyright Sarah Ainslie


The East London Trades Guild is now playing a major role in supporting small businesses, many of them facing the same situation as JC Motors not just with TfL but Network Rail too.

The history of Len’s business and the story of the petition are told in typically eloquent and readable style by the brilliant Gentle Author on the Spitalfields Life blog. As an aside, if you have the vaguest interest in East End history or the stories of its inhabitants past and present then do sign up for the Gentle Author’s daily blog posts, I have enjoyed them for many years.

Len has spent years building his business, he provides employment and apprenticeships and brings a purpose to this unglamourous utilitarian space; all this is under threat. When Len turned up for work last Friday morning to find Ludo’s latest art work on his wall he connected immediately with something in the art. “I was puzzled at first by this huge flower but I stepped back and realised the flower was growing a grenade. TfL have put up my rent and Hackney Council under pressure from central Government are jacking up the business rates, I have a real fight to keep this business that I have worked so hard for over the years going. My staff could be unemployed, apprentices might not finish their apprenticeships, opportunities for future apprenticeships and employment will disappear. I feel I could explode and the artist’s flower grenade seems to capture how I feel. TfL are about to pull the pin!”


Left to right: Jay, Peter, Singh, Hakeem and Len outside JC Motors, Stean St, Haggerston


One of the many beauties of street art is that the work reaches out to the normal “everyman” everyday audience a long long way away from the world of art institutions and learned academics, people can and do respond to the artwork however they like. It is wonderful to find a true gentleman like Len discovering such a deep and personal significance to a totally non permissioned art intervention on the street.


Certificates line the wall in Len's office


When asked why he chose this spot for this piece of art, Ludo told Graffoto “the spot just felt great for me visually...from the barbed wire, the bricks, textures...that's how I find my spots as I don't really know what's going on inside. The only thing that motivates me is to tell a story and the background is as important as the artwork”. So, that Len saw such a specific relevance in the artwork to him and his team is pure serendipity; “[the] good thing about art is you take it as it touches you” says Ludo.

Ludo did a couple of other pieces and somewhat I also found a rather unexpected personal connection to one of them. Graffoto normally despises rolling out the first person singular but hopefully you will indulge on this occasion. 25 years ago thereabouts Lady NoLions and I lived in Dalston, back in those days I wasn’t NoLions but she was and she remains a lady. Her then employer gave her a company car, remember when they were prized perks? This hot hatch (the car, not Lady NoLions) kept getting stolen and one Saturday morning we got a call from the police to collect the trashed and abandoned car. Thieves had stolen her car by shattering the built in steering lock, evidently the car wouldn’t steer properly so instead of joyriding on two wheels around a 90 degree left turn they followed a fast but lazy arc into the wall opposite. Although I have not been on that street since that day, in the first night time “work in progress” photos (gslstudio again) I recognised the wall in the background as the one where the Golf GTI speed test had come to a shattering end. Sometimes the personal connections to a piece of street art are just a bit less wonderful!


2017



2017


Ludo’s other new piece of street art that appeared last week is a classic study in monochrome and green in which nature and the hint of violence collide.


2017


Just a few from Ludo's previous visits to London:


2010



2008



2008


Links:

Ludo website

East London Trade Guild website

Gentle Author Spitalfields Life

All photos Dave Stuart except, with thanks, by Sarah Ainslie (website) where noted

Ludo - Metamorphosis

High Roller Society
Unit 10 Palmers Road,
London E2 0SY (Click for map)

10 September - 7 October 2011

all photos: NoLionsInEngland



If you have any squeamish fears of triffid like invasions, then your sleep will already have been disturbed by Ludo’s enormous paste up Nature’s Revenge project, seen on his several previous visits to London.


London, 2009



London, 2010



London, 2010


Distinctive characteristics of his street project are the enormous scale, avoidance of hall of fame spots, green pigmentation and fusing of organic plants with man made technology. Ludo rises to the challenge of translating this aesthetic into the gallery by creating a mad-boffin’s bio-genetic engineering laboratory bunker; a refuge from a world where nature has armed itself for the fight against man, a grotty lair where scientists deploy crap German accents and bow ties in their continuing destructive research.




Ludo’s cross pollinated plant machine hybrids have leapt off the sheet and into 3D sculptural form. Nutty lab technicians roam the gallery in lab coats, hair nets and sinister latex gloves and embryonic plant mutants emerge from the the test tube glassware and incubation units lying around the insane laboratory.


Tazeropede


Massive schlock horror B movie screen grabs pasted around the walls create a nightmare collage of a world falling to the horticultural armed response to man’s inhumanity to the environment. Scattered around the hide-out are specimens mounted Jurassic park style in perspex moulds as well as mock (or are they????) scientific journals from the 50s and 60s documenting reports of latest developments modifying DNA structures to maximise the yield of organic matter.




Apart from the fascinating and well staged laboratory, evidently un-funded judging by its Heath Robinson-esque arrangements and clichéd demented scientists, Ludo’s art consists mainly of pencil and oil paint compositions on white paper as well as a new print (have there been any before?) and an film of the artist working on the street.


Beestie Boys


As Ludo has made the insanity of man’s destructive tendencies towards the environment the key thread in the fabric of his work, it seems strange that the fearless eco-enviro warrior should aim one of his satirical compositions at a fictional rather than real oil company. On second thoughts, perhaps he is astutely avoiding what has been a tedious rite-of-passage for huge numbers of street artists squabbling over who best bastardizes the Shell and BP trademarks via the medium of a screenprinted edition of 250.


Ewing Fly


So, green remains the game, great to see the mutants in 3D and kids of all ages will enjoy the grungy science lab. The most obvious metamorphosis taking place at High Roller’s Society is Ludo’s morphing into a serious installation creating, gallery-comfortable artist.


e-Lepidoptera,
Hand pulled screen print, green and white hand finished acrylic, ed 25



London, 2011

other photos here