Diggin In The Archives Part 6

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? By the time you read this Boris should have made his “statement” to the nation and one suspects the tunnel will seem to be stretching much much further into the distance. Activities continue to expand to fit the time available and blowing the dust off the photo archive is a good a rabbit hole as any to fall into, so here is this week’s selection of gems from the past.


You wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a snorkeler (snorkelist?) walking down the road with a lion on their shoulders in 2013, it was Shoreditch after all. Twisted surrealism from Dal East.


Dal East, 2013


ACE is full OG London, his comic and pop art influenced collage screen prints were pasted up all over Shoreditch from the beginning. They still appear although nothing close to the quantity he used to put out. One of my all time favourite paste up artists. And there's Skewville , yet again, he keeps popping up in the archive photos. 2011.


ACE, 2011


In 2009 Graffoto founder HowAboutNo and I wandered Shoreditch and beyond on our lunchbreaks, chatting shit and shooting crap. Daytime street art creation was quite rare in those days and one lunch time we spied an artist in act of pasting up some big faces. He scarpered. Brummie Tempo33 told me a while later they had thought we were cops! Not many people wandered round in office garms photographing street art those days.


Tempo33, 2012


As I started to develop a little bit of an interest in street art I had a conceptual difficulty with stickers;,that fact that anyone could have put them up challenged their authenticity. Then I started to get my head around “Representation”. It would be very easy to upload a photo of a stunning mural by D*face, rightly they are appreciated worldwide but his stickers are in my humble opinion are way more significant to his street presence.

Liskbot’s hand finished stickers and paste ups go back a decade, still prolific!

The unknown sticker looks and feels like a corporate logo.


D*Face, Liskbot 2011


East London in 2011 was full of Malarky cartoons. Superficially they had the characteristics of children’s illustrations but close inspection revealed a real darkness. Often painted with compadres #Billy, Mr Penfold and Sweet Toof. These old Hanbury Street gates used to host art by great artists such as Donk , Stik, a Saki and Bitches and Macay collab, a Mau Mau and Alex Face collab and an Otto Schade "Creation Of Adam” masterpiece. And Curly ;-)


Malarky, 2011


In the next pair, the elevated elevation behind the grey gantry is the old Shoreditch Tube Station, closed in 2006. The first picture is from October 2011 and features a Rowdy creature and a piece by fellow Burning Candy crewmate Horror. The second picture dates from July 2012. The difference is the Olympics buff. One of these pics cost me a gorgeous Colnago Road bike, stolen by some Tower Hamlets low life cunt as I climbed up on the wall to get the pic

I am sure you don't need reminding, #fuckthebuff


Rowdy, Horror 2011



The Olympics Buff, 2012


When its good, Street Art can be very “of the moment”. The flip side is that years later the context or relevance of a piece of art may be forgotten. This Teddy Baden multi layered stencil features Mandeville, one of two mascots for London’s 2012 Olympics. Mandeville was named after Stoke Mandeville Hospital, the world famous spinal injuries hospital that organised the first games festival for injured people, seen as a precursor to the Paralympics. The orange flash represented a London taxi hire light. Mandeville was much maligned in the press, there will always be some mirthless killjoy. He didn’t have a good feeling about Teddy’s feline either.

I enjoyed the privilege for many years of submitting a selection of street art photos to the VNA guys for their quarterly zine. The vast majority of them went unpublished, there were far better photos from far better photographers to chose from. This is one of the unchosen. . . .


Teddy Baden, 2012


I took the liberty of visit to Shoreditch on my bike this morning, first time in over 2 months. Very little had changed, street artists have been socially distancing from the walls.  Notwithstanding whatever guff we get from Boris this evening I suspect there may well be more sucking from cess pit of my street art photos this week, catch them daily on my Instagram or facebook

Check out the previous weekly compendiums: DITA 1, DITA 2, DITA 3, DITA 4 and DITA 5

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

Diggin In The Archives 5

“We can’t throw away all our hard work so far”. The current political aversion to trusting the general public with any inkling of lockdown planning could perhaps also be applied to the rich heritage of Shoreditch’s street art. This is the 5th compendium of the daily scrapings of the digital archive, is it really only 5 weeks since we were ordered to remain in our bunkers?

Gold Peg was undisputed queen of the rooftop. She got up in pretty tense spots, happy to mark the environment with text or imagery, a rare example of someone with a foot in both the graffiti and street art camps and hugely regarded in both. Gold Peg's art was always breathtaking and photogenic, this artist is a classic example of someone impossible to adequately represent in just a couple of images.


“Too many artists, not enuff anarchists!!!”, Goldpeg, Shroeditch, 2011


This railway bridge pic also features 10foot (naturally), Serva, aze, rakit and the legend that is TOX trackside.


Gold Peg et al, Paddington, 2010


Everywhere you went in Shoreditch in 2012, Usain Bolt’s eyes seemed to follow you. Painted by the genius JimmyC.


Jimmy C aka James Cochrane


That photo of JimmyC’s Usain Bolt has a van in the foreground which was obstructive, irrelevant and the photo is poorly composed.  Every other photo I took of that mural has a superb Dan Kitchener mural below the JimmyC. Both paintings were brilliant, each distracted from the other in a kind of unfortunate way. Dank's refined and distinctive geisha girls and his drippy Bladerunneressque neon night scenes are rightly revered these days though if you go back more than a decade he had quite a variety of quite different styles. Dank’s mural under the JimmyC was one of a number of brilliant trackside images he painted in 2010, the next image was painted on the Village Underground wall in that same style.


Dank aka Dan Kitchener, 2010


Remember your parents nagging you to stop staring at the pavement? If you listened to them you’d have missed Pablo Delgado's miniature paste ups with painted shadows. Over several years he pursued increasingly surreal themes, Pimps ‘n Hos in Shoreditch was one of his early sets. Yes, that’s Skewville and Banksy hangin' with the pimps as well.


Pablo Delgado, 2011



Pablo Delgado, 2011


In August 2011 Pure Evil had a show at XOYO debuting this pop art eye candy, the first sighting of the Nightmare series. This was one of the first specimens to appear on the street, October 2011 I think. And so it continues, the Nightmares pour out of the Pure Evil creative engine to this day. Also in shot is a beautiful Swoon paste up. A couple of Swoon pasteups in this alleyway in Shoreditch lasted quite a long time, like more than a year. Partially visible is a pasteup from Mr. Farenheit and yet again a Skewville stencil muscles into the frame.


Pure evil, Swoon 2011


Mobstr does a line in knowing and occasionally provocative text based stencils. You could read this as street artists with easy, low risk placement are challenged by Mobstr to get a bit higher and a bit riskier. Or maybe you see Mobstr proposing a photogenic “loadsa-likes” placement spot; or we can even see a commentary on street art as a tool of gentrification doing the developer’s bidding. All interpretations equally valid, feel free to make up your own.

As an aside, in 2011 Brick Lane was named London’s Curry Capital which is about as obvious as declaring Pall Mall the capital of palaces. The Banglatown banner with its photo of the later discredited Tower Hamlets crooked Mayor Lutfer Rahmen appeared illegally over Roa’s famous crane on nearby Heneage St, much to the annoyance of local residents and business who forced the council to have the banner removed within 2 weeks.


Text stencil by Mobster, also featuring Kata, Unga, Andalltha and The Misfits


France is blessed with superb stencillists, Jana and JS have done Shoreditch a few times and when they do Shoreditch, they leave the place seriously more beautiful. This example is slightly unusual in being a stencil on paper rather than stencilled in situ on the wall.


Jana and JS, 2012


Anyone finished Instagram yet? Check out the previous weekly compendiums: DITA 1, DITA 2, DITA 3 and DITA 4

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

Diggin In The Archives 4

Diggin into the archives bring back lots of mostly good memories but some of these artists have done so much brilliant street art that picking just one or two highlights is cruelly dismissive of their street opus. Another week of suspended animation has rolled past so here we go with the 4th collection of flashbacks trawled up from a long forgotten sector of the hard drive.

Anthony Lister did quite a number of stunning superheroes and faces over a number of years and a number of visits. It was quite easy to miss that Lister was parodying the Banksy in Cargo with this piece. Responding to the Banksy piece Lister declares himself over stencils and certainly now with the advent of muralism and greater tolerance of street art the old fashioned single layer stencil is nothing like as common as in the old days.


Lister, 2012


Industrial revolution superhighway meets imaginative Sweet Toof vandalism. Although not terribly far away, the location was quite different to the usual Shoreditch street art beat.


Sweet Toof, Regents Canal, 2010


Louis Masai has done a phenomenal number of projects and art campaigning in support of species preservation and the environment generally. These two are the earliest Masai artworks I found on the streets, dating from late 2011. This blast from the past surfaced on the annual Earth Day last week. One planet, one love, one chance.



Masai featuring False



Masai


One of my lockdown distractions has been reading JR’s “Can Art Change The World”. The first time I came across his Inside Out project was this large mugshot on Redchurch St in 2011. The idea was that you sent JR a photo, he would print it and send it back to you and you had to paste it up on the wall. You may have had to send a photo of it in situ back to him. The self imortalising person in the photo is Ross T. The juxtaposition of Ross’ #insideout portrait with Ron English’s speech bubble was too good to be mere coincidence. Rock The Mouse was a shutter relic from a 2009 Mickey Mouse by Yan77 from Chrome and Black shop which used to be across the road.


Ross T in JR's Inside Out, 2011


There are many artists whose style, ability and creativity have evolved dramatically over the years such as Airborne Mark, or The Pilot as he was known back in 2009. The first photo comes from a hoarding under the Westway where Garfield Hackett and Mutoid Waste staged One Foot In The Grove in 2009. Looking back through my archives One Foot In The Grove was a stunning event, I pass that location on the tube every time I go to QPR and never fail to peep into the space under the flyover and think of that show.


The Pilot, Acklam Rd, 2009


Airborne Mark was an OG mid 80s graffiti writer, this specimen of his graff was in Leake St back in 2008.


The Pilot, 2008


As a reminder of how far Airborne Mark has come, here's a gorgeous specimen of his origami folds painting style today.


Airborne Mark, Shoreditch, 2019


Sometimes it’s about the beauty, the drama or the politics of the street art; sometimes it’s about being in the right spot at the right moment. Monsieur Qui has visited Shoreditch a few times, leaving just a few tantalising illustrations to hunt down each. Love the art, love the bird nesting in the passerby’s topknot giving extravagant coiffure's to both art and life.


Monsieur Qui, 2011


Saki and Bitches’ voluptuous temptresses appeared in some pretty eyecatching spots. Given Saki’s home country is Japan, the influence of Japanese art and use of Japanese subjects in Saki’s work, the appearance of “Tokyo Rising” alongside this Saki’s sturdy study of feminine charm was pure chance. Saki held down this elevated high street spot for several years.


Saki and Bitches, 2011


I'll try to make time for daily blasts from the past this week but I'm making no promises ok. Check out the previous weekly compendiums: DITA 1, DITA 2 and DITA 3

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