Hit Shot Walls June 2013

June was a bumper month for activity around Graffoto towers, not least dry conditions meant casting aside  essential foul weather gear to find something cool but not overly flesh revealing!

All photos: HowAboutNo

Local scene stalwart and Signal Gallery co-owner Dale Grimshaw produced a range of stunning large murals and smaller paste ups.

    DALE GRIMSHAW

Nice to see Narcélio Grud back in London, up alongside the Twombly-esque Sliks, seen partly complete in this shot.

    NARCÉLIO GRUD & SLIKS

The popular and affable RUN, one of London's favourite adopted Italians outside the worlds of football and bunga bunga is no stranger to the Village Underground walls but this cracking swan was epic  in scale, probably the largest painting we have seen from him in this country.

    RUN

Jana and JS returned to London and with a number of permission walls in effect were able to go very large with a couple of self portrait stencil murals but we found the placement of their smaller paste ups stunning.

    JANA & JS

National rag The Guardian has had few weeks getting conspiratorially excited over leaks and revelations courtesy of Mr E Snowden which convince us that the USA's National Security Agency is reading every pithy tweet and bitchy private message, T.WAT came up with this very timely skit on America being all ears.  Then of course we found that the un-authorised snooping in the UK was even more rampant, no surprise there.

    T.WAT & OTHER

Paul Insect continued his highly productive run of paste ups.

    PAUL INSECT

    HiN

Some say this is by Ronzo but we're not convinced.  No reason to say it's not Ronzo, though we'd have expected the baseball cap motif to be a capital R.  Either way, it's a damn fine paste up

    UNKNOWN

A looming wall crisis in Shoreditch is forcing artists with permissioned mural gigs to paint as far away as 10 yards off Brick Lane on smaller and smaller walls.

    BAILON

    KYLE HUGHES-ODGERS

Curious phonetic challenge reading the name on this artist new to our eyes, do you say "Frah" or "Franarchy"? Another artist completely new to us but some of the pure stencil items we located by FR.A are quite stunning.

    .frA

    

   

   .frA

    .frA

    .frA

Blog mucker NoLionsinEngland is familiar with the work of INO from Athens and reports that this little beauty is actually quite modest by INO's standards but its great to see another quality artist coming out of Greece.

    INO

    HiN

    

    BEST EVER

Hackney Wicked

Hackney Wick
30 July - 1 Aug 2010



Hackney Wick is bohemian, decaying, swampy and trendy though a lot of its post industrial bleakness is being surrendered to the concrete sports temples rising out of the mud and mire. Some of the resilient local artist community, 670 or so the promotional bumpf proclaims like some kind of statistical triumph, have had their doors levered open for the annual Hackney Wicked art festival now in its third year.


One of the coolest bits of work was an outdoor-internal installation called Tompson’s Tunnel, featuring miniature concrete steps leading up to a tunnel burrowing into the building with tiny Slinkachu-esque naked figures striding the landscape. The figures looked like they may have been wrapped in foil then lost their skin to first degree burns in some grotesque bbq related accident. The illusion of depth in the tunnel was enhanced by a mirror fitted at the end. Bugger to photograph mind.


Tompson's Tunnel


Quite a bit of live painting had taken place the day before in and around that White Post Lane car park including pieces Snoe, Cept, Seks, DScreet, Busk and Xenz.


Snoe, Cept, Seks, DScreet, Run (&Busk?)


Also in that same car park, intertwined down the structure of the back staircase is one of those robot wooden arms similar to the ones seen at Prescription Art in Brighton last year.




Normally you wouldn’t have polite access to these sweatshop buildings, various handwritten notices pleading for the return of missing items or threatening dire retribution if perpetrators of theft are caught indicate why. The best part of these buildings being open is the opportunity afforded for access to roof spaces and elevated windows, yielding panoramic views and close up shots of rooftop graffiti gems.


Sweet Toof



Sweet Toof


Arriving early like around mid-day, when stalls selling home-made carrot cake out-number carrot cake eaters, had the dual peril of artists still being tucked up in bed and if they were there, you were likely to be the only rubber necker keeping the artist company. You hope as you mooch un-certainly into the heart of the studio that your face doesn’t betray any particular look of horror.

On a hunch that he might have finally surfaced by 2.30pm, a return to the Peanut Factory found Joseph Loughborough aka illjoseph, bright eyed and demon breathed after a bit of a session the previous night.


Joseph Loughborough


Joe has been an artist I have admired for several years and the work on his studio walls was just stunning. Some of them are on his flickr account and without being critical of Joe's photography, flicks don't have a fraction of the impact of seeing these fo' real. Joe was sitting there producing one of his latest series of frenzied, fragmented and smudged charcoal portraits. For me this brief visit was the highlight and made the Eastwards schlep worthwhile (and the bit about demon breath probably isn't true).


Joseph Loughborough


In, around and beyond Hackney Wicked photographs 'ere