Hackney Wicked

Hackney Wick
30 July - 1 Aug 2010



Hackney Wick is bohemian, decaying, swampy and trendy though a lot of its post industrial bleakness is being surrendered to the concrete sports temples rising out of the mud and mire. Some of the resilient local artist community, 670 or so the promotional bumpf proclaims like some kind of statistical triumph, have had their doors levered open for the annual Hackney Wicked art festival now in its third year.


One of the coolest bits of work was an outdoor-internal installation called Tompson’s Tunnel, featuring miniature concrete steps leading up to a tunnel burrowing into the building with tiny Slinkachu-esque naked figures striding the landscape. The figures looked like they may have been wrapped in foil then lost their skin to first degree burns in some grotesque bbq related accident. The illusion of depth in the tunnel was enhanced by a mirror fitted at the end. Bugger to photograph mind.


Tompson's Tunnel


Quite a bit of live painting had taken place the day before in and around that White Post Lane car park including pieces Snoe, Cept, Seks, DScreet, Busk and Xenz.


Snoe, Cept, Seks, DScreet, Run (&Busk?)


Also in that same car park, intertwined down the structure of the back staircase is one of those robot wooden arms similar to the ones seen at Prescription Art in Brighton last year.




Normally you wouldn’t have polite access to these sweatshop buildings, various handwritten notices pleading for the return of missing items or threatening dire retribution if perpetrators of theft are caught indicate why. The best part of these buildings being open is the opportunity afforded for access to roof spaces and elevated windows, yielding panoramic views and close up shots of rooftop graffiti gems.


Sweet Toof



Sweet Toof


Arriving early like around mid-day, when stalls selling home-made carrot cake out-number carrot cake eaters, had the dual peril of artists still being tucked up in bed and if they were there, you were likely to be the only rubber necker keeping the artist company. You hope as you mooch un-certainly into the heart of the studio that your face doesn’t betray any particular look of horror.

On a hunch that he might have finally surfaced by 2.30pm, a return to the Peanut Factory found Joseph Loughborough aka illjoseph, bright eyed and demon breathed after a bit of a session the previous night.


Joseph Loughborough


Joe has been an artist I have admired for several years and the work on his studio walls was just stunning. Some of them are on his flickr account and without being critical of Joe's photography, flicks don't have a fraction of the impact of seeing these fo' real. Joe was sitting there producing one of his latest series of frenzied, fragmented and smudged charcoal portraits. For me this brief visit was the highlight and made the Eastwards schlep worthwhile (and the bit about demon breath probably isn't true).


Joseph Loughborough


In, around and beyond Hackney Wicked photographs 'ere

High Roller Society - Linoprinting Workshop

HIGH ROLLER SOCIETY
10 PALMERS ROAD
LONDON E2 0SY

24 July 2010



photos: NoLionsInEngland except High Roller Society where noted.


After last week’s hugely fascinating screenprinting workshop, Graffoto completed its 6 hour crafts major at High Roller Society’s linoprinting workshop. Guest demo man this week was printer, book illustrator and lecturer (among many other illustrative activities) Nick Morley from East London Printmakers, aka “linocut boy”.

He showed off the tense and dangerous art of cutting lino, creating a prophetic split composition of a sprinting cyclist and a cloud of dust which anticipated Mark Cavendish winning the Champs Elysee stage of the Tour de France the following day. Just for fun, Nick chose to demonstrate a colour blend print across the cloud of dust with a solid blue on the cyclist



Lino cutting the cloud of dust (photo: High Roller Society)



Blending colours



Inking up



Positioning the paper



Beron action



Go Cav!


Using Nick’s freshly cut lino block we participants and devotees had our first crack at inking and the critical skill of pressing the paper to the lino block using a “beron”.


Inking up


For entertainment and experimentation, the workshop had a go at printing on six lino blocks kindly made available by Sweet Toof, Paul Insect, Nylon, Cyclops and SheOne and actually used in the printing of “lim ed” prints on sale at the High Roller Society “Press and Release” show. With a number of different coloured papers and ink colours to try, some of the prints produced by us amateurs looked pretty damn lush.


Sweet Toof proof print


On a technical note, the prints taken off the blocks at the workshop are regarded as “proofs” and some of the noted artists were present and showing how their work could be/should be printed, SheOne showed us how to overlay an abstract piece over a colour background resulting in a gorgeous spikey bold combination. Three artist printed proofs are available from High Roller Society though we understand the online shop may not be fully functional you probably should email them.


foreground: SheOne creating printed image, background: LMNL inks up a block, her hair and her frock



Rather than part of any edition, the “proofs” printed by us amateurs were really have-a-go fun practise pieces for people interested in the process, there certainly didn’t seem to be any signing or numbering going on.


SheOne proof print (photo High Roller Society)


Although we tend to think of lino cut as an ancient but coarse form of reproduction, there are many ways it can go wrong in the hands of the novice. Inking up the plate requires a skilled eye to ensure that the ink is uniformly spread with no blank spots, irregular pressing can cause variations in the image transferred to the paper. The photo below shows an overlap comparison of our first and second attempts at printing on a Sweet Toof lino print. Blemishes? No, those differences are “process idiosyncrasies”.


Sweet Toof linocut prints, newsprint paper.


If you look at the proofs hanging from the drying rack below you can see how the detail in the black marks along the edge varies between the two prints, and they were printed by the artist!


SheOne, Paul Insect (photo: High Roller Society)


Under the guidance of linoprint boy, Little Miss NoLions went next level, cutting a dragon outline (which from Dad perspective got “tense and dangerous”) and freestyling the skin texture and background.




Three days later we have two dragon lino prints still wet, ink on the upholstery in the car (joining the legions of dabs and smears from previous incidents transporting kids' wet painting) and ink on the back of the settee, a window ledge and the dining table.




The demonstration covered a simple small scale version of the process, linocut printing can be done in a variety of more complicated and even mechanised versions of the basic process we learnt. Linocut supremo Nick told the story of how he drove a steam roller a couple of weeks ago to press paper onto some very large lino cuts. The Nolions' mental picture of a lino mat wrapped round the roller with a sweaty, oil stained Nick banging out a repeating pattern on hot fresh tarmac turned out to be wrong but how were we to know.



Thanks to High Roller Society and particularly Jenny for putting on these events, NLIE and LMNL thoroughly enjoyed these insights into such mysterious arts. Thanks also to the artists who allowed their lino cuts to be desecrated by amateurs and to those artists present at the workshop providing help and encouragement. We look forward to High Roller Society living up to its name and bringing a steam roller along to a future workshop.

C215 - Midnight Dreams

Signal Gallery, London
23 July - 7 August

Globetrotter C215 hails from France and burst into the upper echelon of acclaimed street artists with an appearance as one of Banksy’s invited anointees at the 2008 Cans Festival in London. He followed this with a worldwide campaign of gritty single layer portraits of anonymous grizzled street people.


C215 - London 2008


His third London solo show (if we correctly recall one at Pure Evil’s or is that only in our alcohol befuddled imagination?), the second at Signal Gallery, introduces a marked change in subject and style. C215 told us he has spend the last four years working almost exclusively with subjects from the streets, whether they be people or street scenes. He built up a repertoire of some 800 stencil images but used this street stock regardless of whether he was painting on the streets or doing gallery work.


C215 - London 2008


For C215, the key element of his work always has been the street, a homage to that environment and the people who through necessity or misfortune have to make the streets their home. With the epic catalogue of work developed for this theme, C215 says he now feels the freedom to separate his work of the streets from the work on the gallery.


2010 (honest - that's the title)


C215 had come to recognise a regrettable paradox between his desire to work for the streets and his growing gallery significance, it discomforts him to feel he might be moving into a genre of artist who profits from the street communities rather than just document, celebrate and give back. With this show C215 marks a clear separation in that the subjects are almost entirely un-touched by the influence of homeless street dwellers.


Odysseus


C215 has dramatically broadened the colour pallete in this work, gone are the almost two tone sweeps and sepia styling of paste compositions. The application of colour on the faces now seems to be more about contour than skin tone and texture, the backgrounds are more about loose abstract rather than the patterned background he preferred in the past.


Blowing


The coherent direction in this collection is the link between visage and mind. Apparently each of the subjects is based around friends, family and people familiar to C215 rather than anonymous people from the streets. The abstract background becomes a glimpse into the state of mind and various levels of frenetic mental activity. Sometimes the background speaks of confusion, others intense motion and speeding neurons.


Lost Mind


Yet occasionally C215 slips down the gears to serenity, almost


Volare


With is background as a street artist C215 of course prefers anything but canvas, the compositions here are executed on a variety of bits of recycled wood, “salvaged” street signs and other random bits of metal.


Shaker


Amusingly, the picture that lends its title to the title of the show is actually a painting of a mannequin


Midnight Dreams


Clearly the greater work that goes into each of the pictures doesn’t transpose easily to the thirty second hit of a single layer stencil but we have recently seen examples of this more colourful direction on some legal walls.


Signal Gallery - 2010


C215 has managed to maintain the integrity of his relationship to the streets by now differentiating his gallery product, he doesn’t do the indoor spectacular or epic stunt installation of some of his street art peers (yet?) but concentrates on producing consistently gorgeous paintings. This is a lush show, well worth popping in to Signal Gallery to experience if you get the chance.

More photos of Midnights Dream artworks here.

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.