OMT: Rollers, Stones and Athenian Graff

On My Travels


I travel on overland rail in the UK maybe a dozen times a year. Filter that for sober trips with a charged camera and I have more chance of winning the lottery than I do spotting graff on rolling steel. So it was with delight on my way to Gatwick that I spotted this beauty heading South somewhere near Croydon. Hot shit rather than crap tags, the piece on the left appears to be Gekoe, can anyone read the right one?


Gekoe and ? Thanks to Bravo99 for tarting up the pic


On to the Greek island of Kos en famille.   About a mile from our hotel, past the Italian hotel (bella, bella), past the German hotel (put ‘em away love) we came across a rather intriguing landscape of balancing stone piles. Reminds me of Richard Long's landscape natural work. I remember a few years back a micro-debate on a forum as to whether some geezer balancing stones could legitimately claim to be an artist. These piles were curious, effective, pointless, thought provoking and fun. Sounds like a reasonable definition of art dontyathink.






Technical note: Camera by Nikon; tripod - wastepaper bin from hotel.


Back to Athens and a short hour carved out of a packed week of indulgent corporate lotus eating (call that work?) was devoted to a quick whizz around Monisteraki , last explored two years ago and reported here and here.


A surprising amount of stuff found two years ago still survives intact, suggesting not so much tolerance as no budget for the buff.

A nice treat was coming across a large mural by favourite Greek artist Alexandros Vasmoulakis, no idea how old it might be though.


Alexandros Vasmoulakis


Street artist Pete always pleases the eye with his doom-laden shadowy portraits, hadn’t previously seen one directly contextualising the street as gallery in this framed style.


Pete


Unsurprisingly we found some more old stuff by friend of Graffoto The Krah.


The Krah


The Pete and Krah flicks above demonstrate the fabulous ambient surface textures, colours and decay that Athenians get to work on but it's not all crumbling ruins. Near the station on a clean and rather boring wall the unknown Greek street artist casts a wry reflection on the state of Greek society as the IMF try to bang some sense into the place.


Unknown


Speaking of the parlous state of the economy, one curious symptom is offered by Athens' proliferation of legal and illegal road-side advertising. Huge numbers of advertising hoardings across the city have been blanked out, I guess this is the advertisers not having enough paid adverts to cover up old ads when their rented time has expired, no pointing in letting the previous advertisers getting free extensions of their time I suppose. A second theory may be that the authorities are cracking down on illegal un-licensed advertising spots but too many of them looked like flash mechanised rotating jobs that would surely be too expensive to put up un-licensed. Most unlikely to be the work of an Athenian Posterboy copycat.




On the graff side, it was curious to see the major highway from Kiffisias to the Airport completely free of graff, every other dual carriageway is absolutely battered. The taxi driver told me that on that stretch of road any graffiti that appeared overnight was cleaned first thing in the morning and graffiti writers considered it a challenge and a major accomplishment to get anything there that lasted. Won’t take that route in future. More typical of the major routes into the centre is the well spanked appearance of this building.


OFK


Un-expectedly in a state implementing severe austerity measures and switching to taxation by guessing your income, and contrary to the earlier guess that no money is wasted on clearing graffiti or pursuing offenders, a somewhat lethargic buff squad was encountered off the beaten track though their effort didn’t stretch beyond peeling off the easy bits of ancient fly posters.


Athenian Buff, not Buff Athenian


One of the highlights of this whirlwind graff tourism was a couple of big arse booming roller jobs by prolific all-city LIFO. Sadly the camera had a hissy fit and deleted pictures of one up the top of Syngrou Avenue but this beauty overlooking the square outside Monisteraki tube has got it all, scale, crispness, drips and screaming the name in your face.


LIFO, Monasteraki


This visit to Athens was a bit hectic, spent mainly flogging up and down the coast road between Vouliagmeni, Castella and Piraeus with the train journey and short wander around Monisteraki being the only brief incursion towards the centre and North. A future visit hopefully will include a whizz down the street that runs parallel to the metro line between Petralona and Thiseou, the view from the train suggests everything from legal top to bottom buildings to pieces and roof top dubs and fire extinguisher jobs. If it happens you’ll be first to know.




The best of the rest of my flicks of Athens street art and graff can be seen here

Crack and Shine - book review

Photos from Crack and Shine, used with kind permission. Care about the copyright? Buy the book and check the copyright stated there.


Graffoto rarely reviews books, usually because we just drool over the pictures and don’t understand the words. One book that has “4Real” written right through it is Crack and Shine and having completed the secret ritual necessary to buy a copy, we were so impressed we felt compelled to shout out “buy this one”.

The book determinedly asserts its’ mission is to be a real graffiti book on real London Graffiti and targets an audience interested in graphic design, illustration, art history and contemporary British culture. The curious and the disbelieving will also learn a heck of a lot.




The book is a compilation of anecdotes and reflections, reminiscences and polemic about writing (painting) by graffiti writers of yore and today, clustered around a stunning set of “insider” pictures from shoeboxes under the beds of writers backed up by stunning photos by Will Robson Scott.


Drax - Electro Magnetic Intercourse


The most compelling and gripping anecdote is “The Farringdon Burglary” by Bozo DDS in which a troop of legends including Fuel, Fume, Elk and Teach crack the underground labyrinth under Farringdon, break into the building which later housed legendary club Fabric, find a bong and a lump of hash in a skateboard shop office, open a sealed one foot thick vault door and finally, what was the point, oh yeah - paint trains. Painting the legendary Farringdon yard, “Fuel produced a lighter and shone the way like a scene from The Lord of The Rings” while Fume hits his carriage with three tins in one hand, two in the other, tins sticking out of every pocket and “painting like a four armed Indian God”. The pace of the story and the epic brazenness of the escapade take your breath away.



Inside the yard


Reflecting upon the then versus now, drawing on the technical advances in paint in recent times, Diet DDS pays tribute with “it’s mad to think to that people like Fuel did whole cars (front to back and top to bottom) with no fatcaps” (the interchangeable spraycan nozzles, skinny or fat caps for fine lines or covering big areas). As Diet says in his final words ”Oh how things have changed”.

The words of the graffiti writers themselves expose the lie in the myth that graffiti writers are mindless morons universally suffering a lack of education, discipline and morality. The book documents the inner thoughts and motives of a scene whose fundamental concern is expression, so it should come as no surprise to find such articulate and also entertaining writing.


Yeah, 1995 (Check the E, pinch yourself and remember - not done in a legal Hall Of Fame!)


It’s not all effing and blinding and ducking and diving, Siege talks brightly about the quality of flow in graffiti style and gives an illustrated breakdown of the composition of the outline, “the first letter is a good place to start”!. Drax WD talks about the picking a name , spreading the name and becoming the name; Hefner contributes not words but black book character sketches, NEAS DPM writing from prison serving time for graffiti crimes defines the death of a mate as his core motivating impetus.


NEAS (contributing while inside)


Many of the stories are straight narratives of hair-raising exploits, and bragging rights are hard earned in this game. Other stories focus on the reason d’etre, they explain the actual substance of the pieces, not in a technical writers way but more in the way a burner is telling a pictorial story. Prime in “War and Piece” explains the content and pictoral structure of a top to bottom whole car painted in Christmas 1990 with Fuel, “One Thousand Sacrifices 2 Revolt/Revolve” among other things “is heavy with metaphoric symbolism of all kinds of change and death and rebirth.” For anyone intrigued by the scene but not a part of it, this writing is incredibly enlightening whilst always remaining very readable.

The first two chapters are a Teach/Elk double act. Elk captures the essence of a mission to trespass and write graffiti in terse, staccato style “Tunnels, Tube trains, wires, electricity, fear, danger, trepidation, anxiety, tension, dirt, lights, concrete, friends, spray-cans, plastic bags, colours, tags, pieces, a world that few people ever see, hear or smell.”


Elk, Fuel, top to bottom painted in Farringdon


The words and thoughts of the frontline writers are presented with sharp and un-filtered passion, the book wastes no space on explanation of terminology so a reader from outside the culture has to pick things up from context, repetition and plain old making sense of the bleeding obvious.


Britney Spears Is The Devil - Mace, LWS, ID


Prime eloquently identifies one of the big obstacles blocking outsiders from complete insight when he opens his piece with “One of the hardest things to do when giving an account of an intense experience is how to communicate those small personal details that make a situation really something to write home about...the “you should have been there” factor.”


TPG (graffiti - occassionaly done in a pink panther suit)


The key is the quality of the writing. Even Sput, an overseas writer seemingly contributing in a non native language, manages a poetry of expression and sense of spirit which permeates the only slightly Borat-ish foreigner’s English.

My favourite photograph in the book is Fume, under-exposed, standing on an elevated parapet, surveying a tube train intersection. In silhouette he could be a manager in casuals but the languid stance just says “i am comfortable here, this is my domain”. Asked what makes a hardcore writer Fume keeps it simple but generous “A true writer has to have the balls to just get in there and just go for it..good style or not just to get in that yard and paint that train is good enough” though he stresses you must be doing this regular basis. Mind you, a mere week after first tagging a train in a yard, Fume says he was out piecing with Rate, so evidently the hook-ups came thick and fast. When you understand a guy’s prejudices you understand his life and Fume is pure comedy, dissing country bumkin writers with their horrible style, easy train yard access across fields and the nearest shop for munchies 7 miles away and closed most of the time.




One of the most provocative campaigns in the street art niche in 2009 was 10FOOT dogging anything on walls which wasn’t graffiti. He explains his anti Banksy stance in about 100 words, which is about 95 more than he usually writes. The single most significant and important art intervention in 2009 was his writing “say no to art fags” across a Best Ever piece despite or possibly inflamed by their lame attempt to beg his indulgence by giving him a shout in the top corner of the piece. Anything that compels street artists to raise their game and get real is a good thing, though curiously this specific critique feels diminished by being revealed as a performance captured by Will Robson Scott’s camera.


Art Critique? sod blogs and mags...... 10Foot


Treating their couple of pages like a care-in-the-community opportunity for derelict comedians, ATS crew suffer the indignity of having their pages mis-labelled ATG, now that’s gotta hurt. LDS (“Line Dance Steppers”) crew chose to convey their guide to entering a yard, painting and photographing the result in the medium of written and illustrated dance step instructions “bending right knee forward, outline with Montana fatcap, bend left knee forward straightening right leg.”

A key viewpoint universal through the book is that painting steel, getting into yards and painting trains is the pinnacle of excellence, it is the real hard core graffiti act. As the anonymous member of TPG puts it, for one type of writer graffiti is a weekend hobby done with other dads, for the other its an obsessive way of life.

Let’s not get carried away with the notion however that it is all noble ideals, brothers-in-arms and innocent harmless adventure. You have to wince at Fume’s recollection about nicking a train driver’s bags, chucking away his spare clothes, scattering his sandwiches over the track, trashing a working man’s day to day possessions, pretty low.


Fume


Crack and Shine is a glorification of train painting through homage to the panel spraying heroes and their lives. There’s also a bit of roof top and trackside action but hardly a legal in sight. The book came out in Summer last year, despite having pre-ordered this copy didn’t arrive until two or three weeks after the launch. This review has been a “back-burner” scribble since but it takes a while to go through a book cover to cover a couple of times when you actually read the words. Aparently it was hard to find at the start but now it is listed on Amazon. Whatever, if you haven’t got a copy yet make getting one your next mission. Small beer really compared to the episodes you find between its covers.


www.crackandshine.com

Mike Ballard - Shadows Of Tomorrow

Mike Ballard has done two previous illusion room shows. Amid the intense imagery fusing fine art collage with wild style forms and the synapse searing contrasts of the black and white colour scheme, Graffoto has never really done justice to those experiences. His latest illusion project is located in a private upstairs room above the Macbeth Pub, Hoxton St, London. This time Graffoto asked Mike Ballard to talk us through his latest wall, ceiling and floor illusion installation, then decided to throw away its own rulebook (though no one could find it so we think it got thrown away long ago) and let the artist speak direct to you in his own words.

Words: Mike Ballard with intro, endy bit and swear filter by Nolionsinengland
Photos: nolionsinengland except Mike Ballard where noted



“The title is The Shadows of Tomorrow. As in today is the shadow of tomorrow, and just sort of now...Present and stuff. Taken from the Madvillain tune 'shadows of tomorrow.


Photo: Mike Ballard


The character with the rays coming out of his eyes, that’s Vision, but in negative.



The first ceiling focal point is a man exploding, just opening to the universe,he looks a little bit like Jesus but its actually a silhouette of Quasar from the comic era. I thought I’d put him on the ceiling because its [like] opening up to the sky.




There are power figures like the wolf, the superhero, and the face looking backwards is a really graphic version of a character from Carravagio. Then it goes psychedelic with the doors leading out to the universe, mortality, double skulls. This looks like a turban but its a chest, I mirrored it there, on top of the cloak coming down then it starts going into a bit of wild style.




The other ceiling focal point is based on synchronised swimmers, I did this stop animation of this clock ticking round – I thought it would be a good centre piece,. The first focus is more of an explosion but this is more of a 60s trippy looking and round here, more false perspective type thing.




Down the other passage [along front of building] we get mystical again with this horse, a power figure and these dismembered bodies, is part of a sketch by Rubens, part of it is figurative, then the female superhero’s arm is going up and another superhero with a knife where the horse’s second leg would be and then it just flows of into style.




The fissure, the crack is the cosmos all just opening up, the clouds, the energies, the dust from the hooves from the horse, then a bit more planetary solar system stuff, and then..i just thought the girl looked right painted opposite. At first people didn’t see the girl, until I joined it up with the ceiling. Since I did the rest, the girl and the animals have become a bit more visible.




I like the dismembered limbs, just like the bits but I always like painting girls. Like the sorceress from the University of Arts All Of Everything work.




This is not so much an exhibition, i was commissioned by the pub to install all this painting, i am working on a lot more video and collage stuff for a show later on in the year which is more the direction i am on at the moment.

I just like to muck about with the perspective and the scale of things like the size of this girl compared to the horse, just throwing it in, it’s just a weird jumble of things but it has this energy, I’m really into the horses and the clouds from the hooves, energy, dynamic , battle things.



I’d say it took a week and a half solidly, the floor will get fucked up, that’s why we varnished it.

Next one after this, I might try different colours, red and white, blue and white.


Photo: Mike Ballard


The first Ballard room was installed at the Cept v. Mike Ballard in Dalston, the room was an irregular shape entered by going upstairs and down stairs and under half height barriers, think something like a children’s bouncy ball den but marginally more sinister. The second was The All Of Everything, a celebration of the life and demise of the University of The Arts, London which was the last show in the space before it was knocked down to make way for the new Cross London line.

Unlike the those two Ballard rooms, this one is likely to last. Check out upstairs at the Macbeth Public House, Hoxton Street, London. Ongoing!

ROA

Pure Evil Gallery
London
8 April – 2 May

all photos: nolionsinengland

Autumn last year, London’s walls (and a concertina door) turned into one of the largest scale bestiaries possible and those of us who had been watching the flickr photos of Belgan street art documenter Kreibel knew the moment eagerly awaited for over a year had come. Roa was in town.


Curtain Rd, London


Epic in scale and tackling manifestly damn difficult surfaces to paint, Roa has risen swiftly from painting in derelict building in Belgium to become highly prized in any decent street art collector’s portfolio.


East end, London


His first London solo show has just landed at the Pure Evil gallery in London. The work consists of paintings made directly onto the gallery walls coupled with large pieces on scavenged metal.




In the gallery Roa remains true to his core themes out on the streets – black and white creatures done in either figurative or cross-section. Most of the metal works have had a previous life as a clothes locker door, such as you might find at work, at school or in the changing room. Being locker doors they come hinged ready open and close and been keen on a bit of the lenticular image which looks different depending upon the viewing angle (like those moving pictures on the front covers of books from your childhood), Roa sets up most of the art to be played with with different images being achieved by opening and closing the doors.




Most of the two-way pieces flip between surface fur and anatomical innards. You could have hours of fun selecting different combinations of opened and closed doors to skirt around the old image enuii.




Taken as a whole you might see the whole of nature’s life cycle present in the show, right from conception done as a Beatrix Potteresque piece of squirrel lovin’. Roa has allowed a little bit of ambiguity to soften the rodent porn, are we looking at the inner thigh of the rear squirrel’s right leg in which case oh how cute, two squirrels next to eachother, or is it the outer left thigh of some nubile young squirrel-ette in which case the grinning and gimlet eyed rear squirrel should be allowed to get on with his work un-disturbed.




Therein lies the puzzle with Roa’s work, we are inclined to read human emotions and predicaments into the faces and postures of the various animals. It is fairly ridiculous to imagine we can interpret the equivalent “turning Japanese” look of a squirrel on his money strokes, never mind expecting Roa to be painting from intimate knowledge. Yet that’s exactly what we can’t avoid doing. Every Roa piece is squinted at to determine the basics, alive or dead? Hungry and feral or fully fed and bloated? The two horses on the wall in the gallery basement could be piled up spoils of an equine hunt, or two lazy domesticated nags crashed out after a feed.

After the animal world’s equivalent of wining, dining, jiggy-jiggy and a cigarette, the next stage revealed on found metal assemblage is the embryo gestation.





Some of Roa’s best outdoor pieces have been executed in dank roofless warehouses and ancient brick monoliths, the forgotten spaces surrendered by man back to the elements. Distress and dilapidation is part of the furniture at Pure Evil gallery so the basement is the perfect location for Roa to replicate the sense of nature triumph in the return to decaying beauty.


Brick Lane (ish)


Roa has turned the experience of entering Pure Evil’s cellar into a grim descent to a bizarre and unclean abattoir. Birds and rabbits hang from their legs possibly suggesting, at least in the case of the rabbit, the victim of a hunt being hung out to cure though the birds make you wonder if there is some ritualistic voodoo or occult significance.




Roa’s work might be described as representing the triumph of animals reclaiming the urban landscape though several of the pieces lead you to suspect some of the critters have come a cropper colliding with man the hunter. The basement installations look a bit like someone has gone a bit mad with the chloroform on Monochrome Farm.





Roa’s pallete is ideal for creating the sense of nature becoming grease-coated with the grime found in man’s no longer wanted former industrial era buildings. He teases our imagination with the alive/dead happy/sad un-resolved ambiguity and depends upon us to anthropomorphologize the creatures to give them their charm. Very little of the stuff displayed on metal is going to fit happily over the fireplace in the average home but curiously there are some conventional sized drawings displayed on the Pure Evil website.




Sadly, despite the beauty of the work and the un-paralleled marriage between derelict work and derelict location it has actually proved possible to make a fist of capturing the images, Graffoto commends you to Romanywg’s Roa photos which bring all his skills at photographing shit-holes into the gallery and Ian Wallkandy who just can’t take photos that don’t rock.


post script

Just as Graffoto was about to hit the upload button, we came across a couple of fresh ROA outdoor rooftop pieces. The roof position looks great, the animals are superbly rendered, the location is iconic but in the case of the full bird the sense of marginalisation and squalor is defeated by the presence of a huge commercial banner making the location as spoilt and derelict as an Ikea showroom.




And the position of the fresh TEK 13 otp portrait which went up the same weekend as the ROA show opens conflicts horribly with the idea that ROA animals are reclaiming a man-free zone. Oh dear.

Alex Young "Portraits Of Alter Egos"

Westbourne Studios
Acklam St, London W10
April 5 – May 10 2010

all photos nolionsinengland


Graffiti artists need a lot of skill to make a successful transformation to canvas. Alex Young’s new outing at the London Miles gallery shows him using not just a completely different non-graff skill set but also strong ideas too.


Tat Escarriot


Young pursues a pointillist impressionism style and skews the composition, adding inverted and blended multiple images.


Stitch


Dots become drips and dribbles. In this canvas below the drips flow up and down the surface.


Latex


Although the subjects have a kind of goth appearance, it isn’t really important to know whether the brief character biogs accompanying the pieces are fictional or real life. Kitty Cutthroat, mild mannered daytime tea-drinker, burlesque glamour model by night; Kitty Peel, circus performing trapeze artist and pharmacist, if they aren’t fictional Young would be guilty of cultivating and showing off trophy cool mates. The clue to the answer lies in the title of the show.


Kitty Peel


These photos don’t do the luscious tones and textured surfaces of the work, don’t be fooled into thinking they have all the life of flat giclee prints. The other photos also fail to convey the size of the paintings, perhaps a few "contextual" gallery shots would have helped but they'd be full of Vyner St First Thursday trendies.


Jane Doe


YT is an un-reformed indie dinosaur with no inkling of scratch or mixing music but the DJ furiously working away on the decks kept up an impressive set of choons. London Miles have found a novel strategy of launch viewing for one night out in the heart of East London’s “First Thursday” circuit then transferring to their Westbourne Studios location off Portobello Road.


Glam, Kitty Cutthroat


A great show with some classy art pieces, how Odd(isy).


Escarriot


All usuable photos taken at the launch viewing are shown in this little write-up, if Graffoto gets the chance to pop along to Westbourne Studios during the show’s run then more photos will possibly appear in the flickr set.

Banksy v Robbo - War Continues

.........Or does it?

Are these latest changes by Banksy or not? Opinion in the Graffoto bunker has been divided. Can’t say that passions rose to anywhere near bloodshedding levels though.

All the changes basically involve buffing the Team Robbo wording, tidying up and re-working the defaced images.

The Waiter rat has changed to this, little more than buffing out the Team Robbo words, which is ironic as Graffoto likes to imagine Team Robbo left the stencil intact because it was pish anyway and sufficient embarrassment to Banksy itself.




"I don't Believe in Global Warming/War" has been buffed and replaced by a well executed roller headed flamingo, witty for the proximity of London Zoo with its well stocked flamingo pond. Is the perpetrator saying any bird brain could have done the Team Robbo effort?




Fishing boy has caught a no fishing sign and the Team Robbo tagging has been removed, ok, so its funny but not brilliant. The stencilled fish has a weird white dot and dribble from its tail, either this was a deliberate bit of the art in which case what the fuck is it, or it is a complete accident and would definitely suggest this wasn’t a Banksy. If this had been done by Banksy, wouldn’t the drips of canal water present in the original fishing boy have re-appeared?




Finally and utterly predictably, the King Robbo painter is now FUCKING ROBBO, a modification forecast on many forums and flickr comments. It’s done well but all of the other modifications have basically eradicated evidence of Robbo/Team Robbo rather than provoke him, its intent doesn’t seem to fit with the pattern of amendments to the other canalside pieces. Also, the tagging has been completely removed from all the other pieces but on this one the “Team Robbo” tags survives.



Perhaps the flamingo and the No Fishing boy might be Banksy but the other two look more like the efforts of some adventurous and over-sensitive disciples of Banksy. But wtf do we know?



If you need to read more about how the story started, it was covered by Graffoto here.


Robbo got the hump for reasons described here and a Team Robbo reaction kicked in with the wallpaper graffiti roller being taken back.

More details on the Team Robbo crusade against Banksy as it progressed were covered here and here.

2014, sadly..  Robbo RIP