Graffoto Round Up of the Year - Part 1

Welcome pop pickers! A post I have meant to do for the last few years on Graffoto has been a look back at the year, be it a good or a bad one (the year, not the post). The problem in previous years was that I just always ended up leaving it too late in the holiday, my bingo wings thus being held down by my own weight in mince pies and turkey leftovers and sapped of the energy to bother. So whilst the intention this year was to start this post pre Christmas in the hope it kicks me up the arse to finish the rest closer to the end of the year, here I am a couple of days away from New Year's.... So it's more than likely that this will be a post that carries over into 2012. I'll split the year into 4 parts so as not to make the post so long. A picture heavy and word "lite" effort it's about my third post of the year and certainly the biggest on Graffoto. My favourite pictures and work that has gone up throughout the year, starting right at the top of January. . . All pictures are by HowAboutNo except where stated. Cept & Sweet Toof Nychos & Vibes Photo supplied by Mr S. Toof

Philth (indeed!) Kid Acne's Artfags (Spectre also on the decaying shop front sign) Plastic Bones Dscreet & Kid Acne AMAZING to see Zezao work up in London in his unmistakeable style Milo Tchais also getting up more than I remember in previous years. Roa In fact this whole spot got a lot of action in 2011, Mr Sperme popped up and knocked out this one. Shame there weren't many others. Ranking highly as my fave piece of the year...and it's a sticker :( Sadly Stormie Mills didn't paint any London walls that I found in 2011. Slipping in a little bit of South Coast action . . .I found a nice little spot closer to home in Hastings. Unfortunately I have only managed to go there once with a camera in hand. Must change that in 2012. Michael De Feo had a show in London and left a few flowers. A few artists hit the Grand Union Canal at Broadway Market one weekend in March, am not sure there was any event other than perhaps a meet at a local hostelry. . . Xenz Teddy Baden Dotmasters Just oodles of generic damage was often my highlight of the year...more in later posts but this was a big big fave. . .

Gold Peg did a few activist/occupy related pieces through the year (more later) This was the first and boldest, the ad company blocking the message out days later.

Tizer went to Leake Street and did this piece in amazing quick time. I think the squiddlywinkswould call this one SICK!

Gold Peg hit some of the most eye catching and clever spots throughout the year as far as I am concerned, proving as always that half, if not more of the work is all in the placement. My fave other placed spot this year was a piece by Revok, which featured on his blog Revok was later arrested in April 2011 for failing to pay damages to the victims of his previous vandalism crimes So that's it for part 1 of this round up which covered January to March (at least in the order I found them, as mentioned some of the pieces are years old) Part 2 to follow soon covering, you guessed it......April to June.

Josh Sutterby (Alfa RT) solo show

Rolling With The Punches

The Print House Gallery
18 Ashwin St, London, E8 3DL
4 Dec 2009 – 10 Jan 2010



Celebrating identity is at the heart of graffiti, which makes Joss Sutterby of RT (RepresenT) crew a bit of a novelty among London’s finest for his avoidance of letter-form self promotion. While Vibes and Towns drop big “my-name-is” burners around the parish, Alfa chips in with lavish but virtually anonymous characters which introduce a cartoonist’s humour into the RT crew’s pieces.


Eating Beef For Breakfast, Alfa RT and Towns RT, West London


The RT crew are not exactly casuals, winning the 2009 European final of the Write4gold battle in Germany coming top in the tagging, throwie and concept sections (sounds like Final Score at 5 O’clock on a Saturday), Alfa produced the two characters in this Sclater Street piece in April 09


Molotow Cocktail, Towns RT, Alfa RT, Sclater St


Joss Sutterby’s first solo show takes place in Dalston, much better known for its rooftop and wall graff than artfag action.

The dominant theme in Sutterby’s canvasses are tattoos, characters with tattoos and straight use of the art of the tattoo. Portraits feature strongly in the collection and nearly all feature tattoos on flesh, tattoo art motifs on clothing and tattoo art in the background. One of the kings of traditional nautical based tattoo art is Sailor Jerry and references to Sailor Jerry appear in several of the works, most notably the Love Thy Neighbour canvas with its sullen and whey faced man with his death heart teeshirt set on a montage of stock Sailor Jerry tattoos.


Love Thy Neighbour


The shows suggests that on canvas Sutterby is pursuing a style with comparatively little reference to his graffiti work, though through the subjects themselves he brings his involvement in the movement the scene indoors such as in Antagonisers, a portrait of a friend in which the title (AnTaGonisers) and the tee suggests a member of the ATG crew. A GP would likely recommend the friend gets to bed a bit earlier.


Antagoniser


A gothic darkness runs through most of the art, purple roses and skulls form a bed for the anguished figure in Mother posed in painted version of the classic face obscured crew shot. One puzzling element in this particular canvass is that exposed flash is usually grasped by Sutterby as a base for tattoos but here the left hand is lacking detail, leaving it looking un-finished.


Mother


Tattoo art is generally not a big thing for me, other than the work of Dr Lakra which I love with a passion, though his recent London show was fairly poor. The detail of the tats on Ella below brought to mind the way Lakra fills the arms and legs with multiple tat images.


Ella


Two images are multi colourway editioned prints, the King of Hearts shown below comes closest to the cartoonish characters Alfa bookends RT pieces with, though the King of Hearts here is a million miles from the bumbling but well intentioned buffoon of Alice Through The Looking Glass. This editioned print is unusual as two different colourways have been displayed alternate ways up, presumably which way up it goes depends upon which which end the artist signs.


King Of Hearts, Blue and Yellow (also available: distressed background)


The second print references Sailor Terry again, with mono-eyed skulls and rotting zombie arms crawling across the print making various death-head style hand gestures.


Sailor Grave


In the hate filled world of graffiti any writer showing art in a gallery really sticks their head above the parapet, Sutterby has focussed on a show which tangentially alludes to his graff mates but in essence doesn’t expose him to haters accusations of selling out his graff.

Rolling With The Punches: more heavy hitting pictures here.

Bill London: They Seek Him Here

Rarekind Gallery
London
Jul 10 – Aug 1 2009

all photos: NoLionsInEngland


After a fallow period buried beneath the post Banksy tidal sludge of pasted lazer jet print-outs, real painted graffiti has been showing signs of a pulse the last four months or so in Shoreditch. Some spark has triggered an avalanche of graffiti in all its' full glorious letterform manifestations from pissed up tags to Olympic standard wild-style burners. Many sperm have nibbled at the egg to create this fertile explosion of life, one of the most potent seemingly being the arrival of Chrome and Black in the area, the other obviously being the Meeting of Styles event.

Among the various species making up the spectrum of graffiti life, at the top of the food-chain are master writers from RT crew such as Vibes.


Vibes RT


Of course, there is no link between the artist Bill London whose show opened in the Rarekind Gallery beneath Chrome and Black and anyone who would write VIBES RT on walls around London, at least there isn’t in the show flyer, and no one met at the show preview went by the name VIBES (actually, no one I met went by the name Bill London either but there ya go, just one of those evenings where people weren’t wearing lapel badges).


Vibes RT, Parklifers, DasR


First impression of the show was a refreshing sense of restraint, this wasn’t a pile ‘em high sell em cheap “here’s everfink from my black book ‘n stuff the gallerist had out the back” exercise. The gallery walls have been given an illusionist relief jigsaw treatment, providing a background matrix to small number of canvasses spanning themes from urban realism to oriental fantasy landscape.

They Seek Him Here


With the range of styles in the show, Bill London transcends the limited graffiti form. The show can be divided into canvasses with letter forms for folk who like graff content in their wall decoration and art with no particular links to graff. The work ranges from almost realism to abstract and from austere urban to the almost pastoral.

Rising Down


Using classic fades combined with splatters, the charmingly named Chlamydia forms a wild calligraphic exercise in writing letters, in a form recognisable instantly as VIBES, compare with the street pieces photographed above. I’m told that the colouring in the picture is similar to the colour of a pair of skimpies tossed on the bedroom floor in a public information film here in the UK, maybe I just haven’t found the right channel.

Chlamydia


One common and somewhat baffling gallery show feature is the part-wall-part-canvas mural, it always seems weird to contemplate taking away a small piece of what is a larger single artwork, They Seek Him Here offers some kind of way round this defect by throwing in a photograph of the complete piece separately with each of the ten canvasses in the mural.

VIBES


The individual canvasses from this wall piece are going to look fairly abstract, in the example below there is a horrible Andrew McAttee type thing going on (horrible if that’s your reaction to McAttee’s squeaky clean bubbles)

They Seek Him Here (1 of 10 unique canvasses)


Signs of Life takes a macabre eco-doom stance and combines it with a futurist urban landscape, where close scrutiny reveals all is not as it seems. Buildings made of ghetto blasters, grenades and hand signs crowned by a winged spraycan deity form a backdrop to yoots lobbing molotovs across an arena of dead bodies, syringes and pipes like fat doobies leaking toxic waste.

Signs Of Life


If graffiti is art lying in the gutter then Broken Window Theory is a trompe l’oeil looking up at kind of tenement whose rough inner-city appearance condemns the place to become a self fulfilling kind of housing project hatchery breeding crime and attracting crime. Sufficiently flat and cartoonish to avoid looking like an attempt at photorealism (thank god), details like the clothes line emphasize the residential and community use of the building, perhaps appearances can be deceptive.

Broken Window Theory

At the other end of the spectrum from the gritty urban feel of the last two pieces Bill London tends towards a eastern natural minimilism in the trio of tryptichs Bamboo which owe no debt to the alphabet at all.

Bamboo


The rustic theme is maintained in the rural pond scene “Untitled”. The dragonfly which may be about to become fodder for the fish is a motif element which repeats in several places (and had me scanning though old photos of un-attributed graff as this dragon fly has been seen on walls recently if recollection serves).

Untitled


Take You There (below) follows the countryside theme of the two works above, though if you were to take a stab at where the scene might be, a molten sunrise over the Yangtse Gorge might be a reasonable guess. The cloudscape being scorched away by the rising sun has VIBES wild tag in the formations but the impact is almost subliminal, non-graff heads could be forgiven for not realising that there are any letters at all. So, good one for the parents and other-halves.

Take You There


The usual reaction within the graff community to writers putting work in galleries is to treat them as sell-outs and call them art-fags, Bill London exposes himself to this knuckle minded reaction but shows his work is varied enough and strong enough to make such sentiment pretty irrelevant (not to mention irrational). Curiously, whereas street artists prize an element of roughness, grime and runs in their work when they move indoors, as a writer Vibes seeks to display his incredible refined skills to produce a very clean image and highly proficient collection. Rarekind have done a great job of staging a very interesting show in their utilitarian white space.

Untitled


More pics from the show here