EINE INTERVIEW

Eine Goes L......Errrm, Small. Then GLOBAL


HowAboutNo & Nolionsinengland interview Ben Eine and take snaps, except knocked-off flicks where stated.


Some may have thought that Eine's fairly recent departure from the big smoke to the sleepier climes of East Sussex would have meant a quieter existence for the man with probably the most raw pigment in public places in the UK. Graffoto thought it was going to cover the story of EINE’s re-appearence on East End shutters with a new lower case project, little did we or even Eine know of the sudden and dramatic high profile role Eine was to take in the UK-US “special relationship”, more of that later.





Less damage to Shoreditch walls and shutters may have seemed true for a while but to compensate, a short hop skip and a jump down to the the South East coast provides ample evidence that Eine has gone about introducing himself to the residents of Hastings and St Leonard's in his usual brash and colourful way.


He began painting Hastings shutters at the end of October 2009 hitting a variety of seafront, backstreet and high street properties with his classic Eine shutter font capital letters.



More evidence of Eine's campaign in Hastings from HowAboutno here


Since the spring there have been signs of a resurgence in Eine's London focussed decorative output. Other than court appearances there aren’t too many times that a rough diamond art vandal might make a mark in the poshest parts of London but in achingly expensive Knightsbridge, where usually the only spray is a very expensive parfum, Eine turns his hand to designer fashion accessories, coming up with a range of canvas shoulder bags (says our fashion correspondent) for the Anya Hindmarch boutique with a fancy West End price to match.


Eine – Anna Hindmarch bag, no other accessory necessary.


Scattering some Eine letters across the shop front gives the venture the cachet of a connection to street art cool, as Eine is supping with the commercial devil here perhaps it’s appropriate the shop interior ends up looking like a pussy pampering corner in Hell’s chill-out zone.


Not HELL. (click here for HELL!)



Anya Hindmarch boutique, Sloane St, London


World cup fever spawned the Umbro teeshirt design but the emotion an Englishman is least likely to connect with that event is ecstasy, so Eine tempted fate by incorporating an acid smiley. Not to be down on the idea though, the appeal was immediately obvious upon seeing Abby Clancy modelling the tee.


Umbro England World Cup Tee detail - nicked from Umbro Blog. Abby not included


Eine provided some signature shutters to the RED cafe which opened earlier this year in the building which until very recently housed legendary core arts grunge gallery-bar The Foundry (RIP). The nice touch in this piece was Eine integrated into his D a conceptual piece which Part2ism has been putting up around town as part of his CMYK project.


EINE shutters. Floral skeleton and embedded CMYK project by Part2ism


Eine’s shutter font is up there with among the world’s most iconic street art motifs - Andre The Giant and a rat. His seemingly sporadic, separated and isolated shutter letters have appeared across East London over many years. It isn't right to describe them as meaningless un-connected individual letters, Eine invites the observer to make whatever connections they like between letters.

An Eine letter shutter tends not to get tagged to blazes and they brighten the urban causeway of sleeping shop fronts. Rather than receiving a hostile reception, many shop owners hanker after an Eine letter. A place on Ravey Street not only has had an Eine R on its shutter for a couple of years but the occupiers have actually reproduced the letter inside its glass front so that even if the shutter goes up, Eine is still up!


R for Ravey St? (look closely - not a shutter)


In all the years these letters have been appearing on London’s shutters they have been sturdy upper case characters, capitals for the capital. Now in belated recognition of the un-sung heroics performed by those little letters after the capitals, a 100 yard street stretch of Middlesex St in London’s Petticoat Lane area has been taken over by EINE to introduce a whole lower case alphabet - and a little bit more.


Alphabet St - princely

Graffoto’s keyboard botherers have been among the many who have obsessed over many years with photographing individual shutters to complete the set, so the purpose of painting the whole alphabet in one shot is intriguing and Eine’s explanation reveals the un-suspected complexities and ego issues behind getting up his lettering.

“Basically I had the opportunity to do the entire alphabet, We got permission off twenty –odd shop owners to paint the a-z. Normally when I ask permission the guy that owns the shop wants us to do an R and an H because his shop is Ruby Handbags or an S because his girlfriend is Sally.“


Whole Street Top To Bottom letters


The lower case alphabet project started about a year ago but even up to the moment the first can was pointed at a shutter the outcome was still uncertain.

“Eventually we had sixteen or seventeen owners that said yes they would let us do it but they hadn’t agreed to letting us do the letters we wanted and we thought “let’s try it, let’s start and hopefully as we paint them the other shop owners won’t want to get left out and will fall in line.“

Eine’s alphabet is in a sense circular in a very physical way as letters a to m go with the traffic down the street, o to r face them in order against the flow on the other side then s to z are back up at the start on the other side of the street with the y and z looping around to butt up against the a.

“We’ve managed to do it and there’s only one gap in the shutters, there was one shop owner who was definitely not having it” says Eine.



Eines has painted each letter of the alphabet in upper case more than once, in a variety of different colour ways.

“I write things with photographs, so I create my own font and a nerd kind of typography thing is that when a word has got say two “E”s in it rather than using the same E you could use two different “E”s.


BIG ISSUE 2008 Street Art Special feat Eine Graphic Typography


“Half the fun of them being out there is that people can photograph and use them, I’m happy for that” (he adds with much more relish than the typed words might convey).


The work took 5 trips to London which requires a little bit of thinking ahead about colours.

“I bought maybe 200 cans and I laid them out in colour order and I put enough paint in a carrier bag for three shutters. Two colours that would go together for one shutter, two that are opposites and two colours that don’t work together. Then I pick the outline and the horizontals. “

But the all important colour selection isn’t necessarily finalised until Eine is actually on location.

“Quite often, as I put a colour on the shutter I think “ah, that one will look better” so it kind of changes as I paint it”, a dynamic colouring process Eine describes as based upon “motion”.

“When I first started painting I wasn’t being random, I was bring quite selective in my colours and without noticing what I was doing I repeated the same colour combination quite a lot. So what I try to do now is be as random as I can with them to create new and different and more interesting colour combinations. I’m pretty confident that within my colour palette everything will work.“

One curio Graffoto noticed was a duplication of the letters q and r, their doubling up goes back to Eine using photos of the shutters for letterist graphic design.

“I draw out the letters before I go out and paint them but depending upon the size and shape of the shutter the letters change shape and size and the q and r had to stretch to fit the shape of the shutters otherwise it would have been all background and not much letter.”

The stretched q and r are placed on these longer shutters to preserve the continuity and rhythm of the alphabet along the street but Eine was able to write more conventional shaped q and r on a couple of nearby shutters and he’ll use those two when he puts together photographs of all the letter on a single sheet alphabet.


q r squared

The randomness of Eine’s selection of capital letters is partly due to Eine’s need for different colour combinations for his graphic design projects, which sort of explains the appearance of curious non-words from time to time.


Random Letters On Various Shutters


If you wander about 100 yards down Middlesex St towards Aldwych you will come across a very satisfying Eine shutter collection which appeared at the same time.

"One of the days I turned up to paint I didn’t realise but it was late opening, I was sitting there bored and I thought “I’m not waiting around any longer” so I grabbed some paint and said “come one, let’s go and paint this” and I had two guys with me who had helped me before and they said “but we don’t have permission to do this” and I said “yes, but don’t worry, it’ll be fine, no one is going to say anything”.

This illegal improvisation actually meet with strong approval.

“We were standing there at 5 O’clock in the afternoon painting them and all the suits were finishing work and going to Liverpool St and five or six people that you wouldn’t think would appreciate street art or graffiti stopped us and they were like “awwww really good job, you’ve really brightened up my way home which is great”.



Illegal - happy now?



Months and months of hard work and Eine is basically playing to a few pedestrians and some rich old ladies. Then, illustrating how fate can mash up input and impact in totally disproportionate ways, a single canvas has conspired to bring global attention and turn Eine’s world on its head in the last couple of days.

“I got this phone call on Friday night, I was in my studio cutting some stencils, it wasn’t a number I recognised and i was “Shall I answer it, shall I not, shall I answer it, shall I not” and I picked it up and it was Anya Hindmarch”.

She of the shop/bag design combo earlier and evidently a friend of Samantha Cameron, accessory designer and wife of British PM David Cameron.

“it’s a weird phone call” she said “a bit secret, a bit strange but Samantha and David Cameron are really big fans of your work [did she really say it like that??]. David is looking for a piece of art to give to..and I can’t mention any names but...he’s the most important man in the World from America”.

Eine agreed, Anya asked to give his number to Downing St which must have seemed a slightly bait request, and Downing Street rang.

“Again they couldn’t say who the painting was actually going to go to, but again they made it pretty obvious it was going to be Obama.”

Downing St had checked Eine’s ancient and woefully neglected website but all that stuff was long gone. Graffoto would have had no problem selecting a decent keepsake for the US President.




“I sent them some pictures of stuff that was available and they kind of hummed and haaa’d, I can’t imagine how many people had to agree it and disagree it and find out if there was anything vaguely negative or could be construed as bad and then eventually they came back and said “we really like Twenty First Century City”. They picked it up on Monday and it flew over to Washington with Cameron and was givn to Obama on Tuesday. They needed it on Monday and I got the call on Friday before.”


So Samantha and David panic buy pressies just like us real people!



TWENTYFIRSTCENTURYCITY (photo nicked from Eine’s website)


Political gifts must be subject to intense scrutiny for potential to offend and embarrass, so where did the inspiration come from? Eine told us “I had recently done a painting that said Metropolis and I was looking at the graphics of Blade Runner and I’d recently watched Blade Runner and “Twenty first century city” just kind of seemed to invoke the powerful imagery of Blade Runner”.

The reaction to Samantha and Dave’s gift and the sudden prominence in re-establishing the fractured entente cordial (didn’t their last President think that was a French soda?) has been astonishing and it’s ironic considering Eine’s ambivalence towards politics.

“I’m not massively political in any way, I doubt I would have voted Tory if I had voted, I didn’t vote as I didn’t have time, I was too busy with the kids but I also doubt if I would have voted Labour. If the painting had been staying at Downing Street it would have been a difficult decision to make but the painting was going to Obama so it made it a lot easier for me to say yes. I think Obama is a good home for the painting to go to.”

The international spotlight has picked out Eine (“Graffiti sensation” – Hello magazine; yeah that’s where Graffoto does its research) and quite a few media outlets who know diddley squat about his cultural significance have been bothering him but Graffoto gets in the critical question they all ought to be asking – will you be painting that famous door at number 10?

“I doubt I will be going to Downing St. The last two days have been pretty mad, lots of press and lots of TV, I’m hoping that it’s all going to die out and I can get back to normal.”



POSTSCRIPT (Sunday 25th June)

True to Eine's last comment above and his current burst of activity on the streets, Eine has been out in the company of Pure Evil and RYCA painting his heartfelt view of the events of the past 9 days:


"The Strangest Week" - photo Pure Evil

Printing as Process: 3 Workshops @ High Roller Society

HIGH ROLLER SOCIETY
10 PALMERS ROAD
LONDON E2 0SY

10, 17 and 24 July 2010 (at time of writing, 24 July is next Sat)

photos: NoLionsInEngland


When Graffoto professes ignorance of something, deep rooted fundamental mental blankness is only the start. Screenprinting is a term whose meaning hadn’t troubled us too much. Whatever it was, the result could be an object of beauty to grace the living room or, depending upon artist and taste, something even the late Bobby Sands wouldn’t have had on the wall of his cell.

High Roller Society is holding a series of Saturday afternoon workshops demonstrating the basics of monoprinting, screen printing and linoprinting.




NoLions in the inquisitive and fascinated company of Little Miss NoLions and a dozen or so other printing affecionados revelled in yesterday’s screenprinting exposition by the ever wonderful printer to the stars Aida of Aidaprints.




With two printing frame thingies set up in the gallery, Aida demonstrated printing on paper, canvas bags, teeshirts and a blended colour print on paper.




The group was inducted into the East London Anti Graffiti Network, a clandestine graffiti vigilante group evidently dealing graffiti everywhere it – sorry – dealing WITH graffiti everywhere they go. Over the course of the three hour session everyone had lots of goes at printing the network’s ironic logo onto paper, canvass bag and teeshirts.




Aida has been printing since she was an embryo, starting in her bedroom and destroying her bathroom in the process. There are a million different technical aspects which she is the master of and during the course of the afternoon we heard lots about registration, paper shrinkage, ink mixing, water spray research and development(!), the dangers of keeping urea in water bottles and Poundland double-sided sticky tape. The bit about heat lamp selection sounded a lot like the project proposal for an attic cannabis nursery. This had me pondering a new circular conundrum: which came first, the artist or the dope-head?

The event was fun, informative and superbly put together, we owe thanks to High Roller Society Gallery for setting the series up and Aida and John for their time both on the day and also preparations prior to the event. The final workshop of the series covers linoprinting and takes place next Saturday 24 July, more details from the High Rollers Society website here. Also, various High Roller flicks including the various workshops here


PS – there are some stunning APs and low edition prints on sale at High Roller Society, check out the shit in the racks, the "shop" page on the High Roller Society website isn't even the half of it. Simply mind-blowing.

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!