Diggin In The Archives Part 9

All photos: Dave Stuart


In the week we discovered new ways to test your eyesight, the photo archive continued to exhibit 20/20 hindsight with visual crackerjacks from the past.

Mr Cenz has a spraypainting pedigree that stretches back over 30 years so it is not surprising that his style has evolved considerably. He is famous these days for intensely colourful portraits with shafts of light and starbursts, those elements are clearly emerging in this 2013 portrait yet at the same time, it is quite different.


Mr Cenz, Ravey St, 2013


The two seemingly abstract paste ups above on the Grant and Taylor sign represented folded garments by Specter from NY who dropped some art works reflecting on visual aspects of the homeless community when over in 2010 for an exhibition in the Pure Evil Gallery.


Next, a pair of east end classics, Sweet Toof and Paul Insect on a paste-up mission around Brick Lane. This pair of beautiful decaying paste-ups has long gone but this 2013 photo also shows Jonesy’s “Sand Tar Nightmare” from 2012 complete with the original Native American headdress feathers which is still up today.


Sweet Toof, Paul Insect, Jonesy, Fournier St, 2012


Graff snapping mate for many years Joe Epstein aka LDNGraffiti, author of street art book “London Graffiti and Street Art” has teamed up with 9 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.


LDN GOSH Charity Book with Run Art


Italian artist Giacomo aka RUN paints stunning murals around Shoreditch and North London. Flat faced characters express surprisingly intense emotion and always at large scale. This pair of characters competing for the passer-by’s attention dates from 2009. Needless to say that spot on Hackney Road has no sense of that urban dereliction now.


Run, Hackney Road, 2009


Click HERE for a blogpost with more images, details and link to how to support the fund raiser and maybe win one of these fantastic prizes in the #LDNGOSHLottery, keep an eye out as well for further announcements of more prizes.




This D7606  &  C3 collaboration from 2013 found a perfect home on the haphazard accumulation of red and white marks on this Blackall St door.


D7606 C3 collaboration, Blackall St 2013


Dan Witz is full on old school street artist from New York who has blessed London with impressive street art on several occasions. Each passion project has been cause driven. It was Guantanamo in 2013 (1st photo) and his “Empty The Cages” anti animal cruelty project in 2014. The joined up element between the two visits was the theme of incarceration and cruelty in both.


Dan Witz, Rathbone Place, 2013


I recently cycled through Kings Cross and can report with pleasure and amazement that the PETA (People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals) installation below is still in place. See Graffoto.co.uk Feb 2014 review http://bit.ly/10Cp9pu


Dan Witz, Kings Cross, 2014


The magical power of art to turn humble domestic artefact into art icon has an honourable lineage that ultimately culminates in Toasters! Toasters already came up in Week 2 of #DigginInTheArchives but embedded in this bit of #flashback fun is a cruel selection process as a limit of one image only per artist was imposed #rulesforbenefitofall #rulesapplytoall (according to government deputy Chief Medical Officer Prof JVT when he brooke ranks at the briefing podium to condemn lockdown breaches by unelected shameless creep Cummings).


LDN GOSH Charity Book with Toasters Cover art


Thanks again to Joe Epstein's fundraiser for Great Ormond St Hospital, the Toasters corner of the archive gets forked over a second time. This stunning appliance from 2010 faced a Roa hare, famously spared the council buff thanks to a public petition. That green board next to the Toaster was the same property that Run characters were on in 2009, see above.


Toasters, Hackney Road, 2010


Every week now it feels like it is time to draw DITA to a close, to get out, do more contemporary but social distanced street art spotting. We are however feeling inclined to err towards the side of the scientific advice and, again in the words of JVT, “not tear the pants out if it”. DITA daily uploads will continue on the Dave Stuart instagram


Check out the previous Diggin In The Archives weekly compendiums starting with week 1 and then hopefully navigate the index to find the rest: DITA 1

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

Diggin In The Archives Part 7

Never in history have the words “relax lockdown measures” been so badly abused. Please stagger your viewing of this post and share with only one person outdoors. Here are this week’s street art little gems from the past.


Jorge Rodrigues-Gerada is probably more widely known these days for his enormous land art portraiture but in 2012 London was blessed with a number of works by Jorge. This beautiful 2012 charcoal portrait was ludicrously short lived.


Jorge Rodrigues-Gerada, 2012


Cartrain was a marmite kind of artist, people either loved him or hated him. I had got pretty fed up with him constantly hitting up stencils right onto the edges of Banksy stencils around Shoreditch. Then in 2007 he came up with these collages, a massive transformation. The first few had proper gilded picture frames and he added spoof Perspex gallery labels alongside them though I guess the logistics of economically sourcing frames led to the cardboard cut out frames. I thought it was brilliant, others struggled to make sense of the random meaningless combination of images. Then came his appropriation of Hirst’s diamond skull and that evolved into a whole other drama of its own. These unusual diptych framed specimens here date from 2011.


Cartrain, 2011


There is nothing quite so exciting as a good hack of the corporate intrusion on the visual landscape. Meaning, ad busting rocks and Vermibus is a master of the form. In 2012 Vermibus was one of the key participants at Moniker Art Fair which in those days was still based in its original Village Underground location. This advert box, not far from Moniker, is a single purpose intrusion into the public pathway, it’s an illuminated obelisk straddling the pavement angled for visibility to car and bus occupants.


Vermibus, 2012


The second image is a collection of keys for illicitly accessing the different forms of those advertising spaces displayed by Vermibus at Moniker. Fuck corporate privilege, subvert its purpose.


Vermibus at Moniker, 2012


Remember Ai Wei Wei was placed under house arrest in China in 2010? In April 2012 I chanced upon this Free Ai Wei Wei stencil by Bambi sweetly captioned “You can cage the singer but not the song”. This photo is out of focus, the lighting is shite and composition is abysmal but when you want to photograph a piece of street art you stumble on en passant, you make the best of whatever light and technology is available. In this case, it was the shittiest out of date corporate Blackberry with a camera not much more advanced than a pinhole and the Guinness enabled focussing feature selected. When I returned in daylight with a proper camera a few weeks later it had been buffed.


Bambi, Marylebone 2012


Lovepiepenbrinck shared her time between Hamburg, Berlin and London and for years put out a series of piggies each presented as a different character. The piggies were quite small, often they were high up and sometimes completely hidden in dark spaces. Finding the piggies was like a treasure hunt. This example was the Ronald McDonald piggy obviously. One piggy was disguised as a shark, mounted in a small glass cube and glued to the outside of the Tate Modern in 2012 when Damien Hirst had that huge show there. Its title was “The physical impossibility of being a shark in the mind of a pig”. Street art genius! (And I never got to see it for real, security had it removed very quick).


Lovepiepenbrinck, Commercial St 2013


Stay alert! You have nothing to fear in isolation except Skeleton Cardboard’s morbid dancing skeletons. These used to appear in many imaginative forms, often interacting with the fabric of the wall or as a response to existing artworks. Dem bones were guaranteed to raise a smile . . .


Skeleton Cardboard, 2013


Nether's street art first appeared in London in 2012. When he returned in 2018 his style was dramatically altered, though those distinctive planes remained a feature. Also sneaking into the margins of this this photo are an awesome piece by Mr Wany, a detail from the edge of a Pez mural also dated 2012 and the conceptually brilliant pulse of EKG from New York.


Nether, 2012


It looks like the archives are going to be forked over for some time yet, each one of these photos reveals itself like a little speck of glass in an ankle deep farmyard.

Two months intensive use of the internet means you don't need to be told where to find the previous selections of archive gems, but here is where it began with the first weekly compilation of the daily uploads: DITA 1,

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