Reykjavik Writing and Street Art

VNA Issue 19 (July 2012) has a glorious 7 page photo spread of graff from Iceland’s capital Reykjavik, shot by me on my first visit there a short while ago. The photo features the local stars of the graff scene as well as one or two illustrious visitors. The mag is available in many disreputable newagents, bookshops and graff stores as well as online direct from the VNA gang HERE. This blog post is a sister to that VNA graffiti photo feature , the VNA guys had first dibs on photos and none of magazine photo spread appears here, so get the magazine for even more highlights.

There was so much beauty, energy and colour in the Reykjavik graff dispplay that a further set of pics neither in the magazine nor the blog can be found HERE.

All photographs: NoLionsInEngland

This is a reproduction of a guest blog originally written for and published on VNA’s blog.

Expectations of Iceland are framed by volcanoes, glaciers, sea life and thermal baths but not necessarily graffiti. As the airport bus meandered tight streets disgorging short stay tourists, down a side street the elevation of one building revealed a top to bottom London Police. Where did that come from?! This stunning end elevation set the scene for un-expected discoveries almost everywhere we turned.

London Police, Sara Riel, Nomad, Above

A healthy graffiti culture requires a used and abused alphabet. The icelandic language is written using more or less the same letters as English albeit some are embellished with squiggles and other ornamentation, the thing about Icelandic letters which perhaps explains why an Icelander getting hold of a spraycan might be inclined to graff is that they do love using a heck of a lot of them.




Graffiti in all its forms is pretty dense in the area between Skulagata and Hverfisgata right next to the centre of Reykjavik, we came across three Halls of Fame within barely half a mile.







Sticker culture and tagging is as rampant as you’d find in any other street art tolerant locality.




A boarded up building with intriguing runic graffiti on the outside (see VNA 19) and its front door off its hinges beckoned. Inside, floors and ceilings have been removed but every surface was decorated with tags, pieces and “street” art while nooks and crannies were stuffed with empty cans and stencils. A bit of post Reykjavik digging revealed that the recent history of the building mirrors the economic Pegasus trajectory you can’t escape in Iceland today. It had been a thriving musical instrument shop that closed. Developers moved in, gutted the building and went bust. More developers came and went without troubling themselves with any actual work and the building is now in the hands of a Yoga group who are bending over backwards to get planning approval. So in came the graffers and the building played host to an art rave a year or so ago.






In the centre of Reykjavik you will find a considerable amount of authorised rooftop art by Theresa Himmer, from the “Mountain Series”, all playing off some aspect of the raw Icelandic outdoors.

Theresa Himmel

If authorised artists can get up high then un-surprisingly rooftops are going to host other illegal artistic endeavours. Rooftop dubbings are not uncommon around the outer suburbs of Reykjavik and we even found writers and street artists getting up high in the centre.

Goodkid

Tier

Bubblegum Boy

Halls Of Fame in most large cities are commonly backdropped by council housing blocks, railway arches and pockets of irregular over-grown post industrial wasteland. In Iceland HOFs, the amazing un-polluted airy light complements views of fjords and glaciers.

Money CMF

On the theme of backdrops, anyone familiar with British news from the early 70s will be amused that Icelandic gun boats expelled British trawlers from their 200 mile fishing limit but in their home port failed to prevent roadside graff under their very nose.

DAT Crew

In defining the pecking order of graffiti kings, no action fosters greater kudos than changing the colour of steel train panels. Iceland doesn’t have a public railway network so in this nautical orientated society the obvious substitute is your top-to-bottom fishing boat.

CMF

A spot survey of the local culture by an outsider on a whistlestop visit can’t be authoritative about who is up and who is “all-Reykjavik” but we can “wow” at the quality and quantity at that moment in time. Casio was everywhere running the full gamut from stickers and tags to throws and pieces.

Casio

Kopur has style.

Kopur

Vato has beautiful flow, great fills and rocks characters as letters.

VATO

Evidence on the streets suggests five or six overlapping crews calling Reykjavik HQ but without doubt CMF (Cash Money Fame, Crazy Mother Fuckers) are the most in-your-face.

CRAZY – believed by VATO

Beany hats off to Reykjavik graff!



Reykjavik Links:
FEW CREW flickr
Vato701
Clone DAT
IFCA Crew

High Roller Society Teeshirt Printing with Copyem

High Roller Society

10 Palmers Rd

London E2 0SY

Sat 30 June & Sun 1 Jul 2012, 1pm - 5 pm

Copyem: Facebook; Tumblr

All photos: NolionsInEngland

This Graffoto scribe has learned a bit about various forms of printing at workshops which run by High Rollers Society gallery in East London.  As the NoLions wardrobe is notably bereft of cool teeshirts, a teeshirt printing workshop looked like too good an opportunity to miss.

Copyem, master of tee shirt printing, has been printing teeshirts, sweat shirts, hoodies, vests, tote bags as well as vinyl, paper and boxes for a couple of years out of his own  fully equipped studio.  High Rollers bumped into Copyem at Pick Me Up, the contemporary graphic art fair at Somerset House earlier this year and that chance encounter between kindred spirits led to this workshop this weekend.

Copyem brought some screens and some basic teeshirt printing equipment to the gallery.  Not to damn with faint praise but for multicolour printing and larger volumes Copyem uses 8 frame carousels which are not practical to schlep across London to the gallery, hence the basic gear in use today.

Graffiti Is For Losers - Copyem12

The first step in the process is obviously, create your artwork, which leads onto the second step, burn your screen.   Step 1 was fulfilled by several notable artists and Copyem had already burned the screens back at base.

Copyem screen

Handy tip alert - Copyem applies an abundance of tape to the screen outside the image area in case there are spots where the photosensitive chemical didn’t harden in the burning process, so the parcel tape prevents un-wanted ink leaking through those spots. The screens are clamped into the screenprinting press with the image centralised.  A light spray of adhesive to prevent the teeshirt from slipping around preceeds the stretching of a teeshirt over the wooden base.   

Young Master NoLions - Scientists discover lack of can skills is hereditary

The screen is charged with screenprinter ink, though other forms of acrylic and water soluble ink can be used, and the squeegee is used to drag ink across to “flood” the screen.

Flooding complete, the ace printer makes two or three passes across the screen with the squeegee to force the ink through onto the teeshirt.  We were all ace printers for one afternoon!

When the image looks solidly printed, the screen is lifted and a heater element placed a couple of inches over the tee to dry the ink off.  Rumours abounded of people popping tees into the oven or under the grill to complete this stage.  

Hey presto, super cool kid with the hottest teeshirt around.

At the workshop we saw three different designs being printed , the purple Goldpeg above and  a black on white “Graffiti is for losers" and a pink (ok – fushia) coloured character by Copyem12.   Anyone could have a go at printing the Copyem designs which could be taken away for a fairly nominal donation to the costs.  The Goldpeg and couple of ultra cool multi colour Rowdy and Sweet Toof tees were available to buy from the gallery.   The Sweet Toof tees came with a special screen printed Toof image which looked to have uniquely varied backgrounds.

Rowdy, Goldpeg, Sweet Toof

Sweet Toof screenprints (inside the teeshirt packages)

The compact layout of the High Roller Society gallery makes for a very intimate workshop experience, participants not only get to see every aspect of the process close up, the “vibe” lends itself to informal discussion with the expert presented as the workshop progresses and everyone gets to have a crack as well.    If you are reading this on Sat 30 June 2012 or before 5 pm Sunday 1 July then there is  a chance tomorrow (Sunday) for people who couldn’t make today to have a go and (or) to pick up some of those cool teeshirts.  Well worth a quick visit.

Copyem: Facebook; Tumblr

PS - a tiny selection of the cool schiz from the Good Times Roll Show now on at High Rollers- another good reason for heading down to High Roller Society:

Numskull (Aus)

Rowdy

Nylon

Martin Lea-Brown

Remi Rough

Dark Clouds (NY)

Milo Tchais

Dark Clouds (NY)

Banger Art - Part II

13 Jun 2012 - 1 night only

then Lovebox Festival, Victoria Park, London

15 Jun - 17 Jun 2012

all photos NoLionsInEngland,

In case you missed Part 1 of Graffoto’s news and views from Banger Art, check it out here (opens new window or tab or something) for background and loads of artwork.

Eine, Will Barras, Aida, Sweet Toof

Did you know Pablo Delgado also painted? News to us but a reliable source identified these coarse and somewhat KKK channelling figures as by Pablo.

Pablo Delgado

Matt Small paints anonymous humanity, defusing the stereotype and reducing the inferred intimidation. In this show Matt paints on car bonnets and doors, revisiting a format he showed at Black Rat Press in early 2009 but let’s face it, there aren’t many forms of reclaimed metal that Matt hasn’t daubed. Matt’s technique is based upon blending various immiscible oils and liquids on a level(ish) surface then dragging the fluid around to create the image. A little information about his technique is quite irrelevant of course as these hanging works serve as a jolting reminder of the colour and beauty in Matt’s portraits.

Matt Small

One of the first examples of Will Barras’ work this keyboard botherer came across was a battered van at Cans II Festival in 2008, his stunning char-a-banc at this show was an even wilder and willowier series of ethereal wispy human and equine figures on a smoky abstract background. Should black, greens and cornflower yellows work together in a Ridley Walker-esque frieze of gothic post apocalypse characters and mad animals, perhaps not in theory but behold the beauty.

Will Barras

The underground car park is huge, let’s take a guess and say it might have fitted 60 to a hundred cars in the architect’s utopian scheme. Pillars, pipes and weird skanky flooded side rooms break up the space. Transits, that is lines of sight rather than Ford vans, offer all kinds of beautiful interactions between cars, installations and art on the walls.

The eyes have it: Jorge Rodriguez-Garada, Matt Small, Sweet Toof

The Borrowers style miniature figures of Pablo Delgado have been populating the streets of London for over a year now but the pavement level dwellers have suffered some tragedies with spectacular lorry jack-knifings and terrorisation by Aida’s oversize dayglo queen of the jungle. It has the look of a cult B movie in the making.

Aida, Pablo Delgado

The car decorated by Pablo Delgado features a hugely intricate mankind-as-plague tableau. The human population squeezes out the animal kingdom and to escape their self inflicted overcrowding the humans scramble up the passenger side door (dear America, right handed drivers would find drive-by shootings easier with the steering wheel on the other side) and in through a hole in the window, to reappear out another hole on the driver’s side where they expire in free-fall, greatly improving matters for the rest of nature which now have more room to graze. As a fully thought through coherent composition executed in pain-staking detail, this stood out in exceptional company.

Pablo Delgado - passenger side

Pablo Delgado - side where the steering wheel goes

Back to Aida, the Princess of Screenprinting has done a masterpiece of pop art with more than a hint of glam with a glittery neon zoological kaleidoscope, perhaps the spangley gun on the dashboard even hints at gangstaaa! Rising to the challenge of the novel medium, Aida brought her screens with her and sprayed through the image with aerosol stencil style, bet that’s easier said than done..

Aida

Group shows generally give us the willies with many ill-combined artists chucking in lackadaisical “cluttering up the studio” pieces but in Banger Art, all the artists worked on site for days putting in shitloads of time and creativity. There is not a single crap “dialed-in” performance in the cavern. In the case of the artists whose work is familiar to us (sit down Dan Hillier, Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada) the concept was much more taking the refinements of the studio art to the car park rather than the usual cash-in taking the street into the gallery, except of course for Matt Small who routinely paints rusty metal in the studio. Good art deserves a great environment and this grubby neglected underground bunker provided a perfect ambience for art on wrecks.

Dr D

The potency for street art to play a positive role in a regeneration programme has been discussed before and specifically was one of the elements in justifying the use of the St Peter’s estate car park facility.  I am a little inclined to be sceptical and cynical about this but there is no doubt that the wave of positivity around this event, where the door was open and residents mingled and marvelled, creates a lasting impression that feeds into the necessary positive sentiment about the area.

There was something so right about this location for this spectacle, it will be interesting to hear from anyone how these cars fit in in their second incarnation at Lovebox festival in London’s Vicky Park this weekend, link up your pics in the comments below.

The texture, scale and colour of this show made it incredibly photogenic. More photos meaning other photos not used in this blog are here.

Ella (surprise guest)

With so much to see and so many ways to see it, there are several other great photo sets out there and each has a number of unique pieces not repeated in the others, check out HowAboutNo, Hookedblog and LDNGraffiti

Banger Art

13 Jun 2012 - 1 night only
then Lovebox Festival, Victoria Park, London
15 Jun - 17 Jun 2012

all photos NoLionsInEngland, except HowAboutNo where stated

OK, so who’s idea was it to mash up memories of an embassy car park (Banksy, Swiss Embassy, London) with the spirit of a secret NY subway station (Workhorse et al, Underbelly)? Step forward Nelly Duff with their one night only art on scrapyard fodder jalopies in an abandoned basement car park under an intimidating Hackney block.

St Peters Estate underground car park

Street art gets the setting it deserves in this underground swamp, it is filthy, reeks of piss in corners, had to be swept of needles and shit and figuratively is a million miles from the sanitised, optimised cubicles most art in the city is seen in. The walls are festooned with graffiti evidencing a propensity towards racism (NF), football tribalism and even burned out occult weirdness.

St Peters Estate Car Park: "they'll kill you...before we lay" apparently

This show is as much about the vibe as the art. Over this space is a concrete playground surrounded by high rise council flats.  Intended originally for the cars of local residents, the space became the problem haunt of junkies and vandals with a noted propensity for torching vehicles. Contributing nothing to easing the social issues in the area, the council sealed off the car park many years ago, residents who have lived in the blocks for over 10 years said they had never seen it open. Brutal walls and stark lighting lend a grimy austerity which fuels the sense of in-hospitable danger. Calcifying stalactites leach out of the concrete and drip something that probably isn’t spring water on cars and punters.  So it's a perfect place for some street art.


Aida


Ten artists jumped at the chance to pimp clapped out cars, though Jorge Rodrigues-Gerada confided he would have liked his to have been burned out and rusty as well, who’d have thought that’d have been too much to wish for round here. Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada is far better known in America where his forte is the top-to-bottom building end gable photorealistic portraiture done in charcoal. The rougher the surface the better he says, this car represents quite a different scale to his usual street works. The medium is charcoal on white paint in the style of revenge attack on teacher’s car. I love the detail of the photographer reflected in the eyeball.

Jorge Rodrigeuz-Gerada

Dr D never misses a political target and this week has seen a former Prime Minster of the UK demonstrate the extent to which politicians have been at the whim of an excessively dominant media baron. Politicians and the press are stable targets for Dr D so he/she/they (whatevah) must be wetting themselves with the revelations in London this week about the media and government taking dirty weekends away to finger eachother, while the media mogul stuffs hoards of cash in tax shelter hide-a-aways made from feeding us a diet of scandal, lite porn and celebs. The scary thing is the headlines pasted in the car are from real lfe.

Dr D - Tits and Farce

Eine’s Beemer has been decorated in a crystalline diamond pattern which originated from the new direction used for the background of his recent Lowrie Museum mural, The application slick and mechanical, the colour pops off the car though photos from the Lowry suggest that the pattern works better in lighter colours as background to huge circus font letters rather than the small stencil tags on automobile bodywork.

Eine - Diamond Beemer

Dan Hillier’s car was stuck in the darkest corner furthest from the bar, probably not being seen by many in its paste-up’d glory, which is a shame as the scary surrealistic fauna as humanity and dali-esque bodies are fascinating.

Dan Hillier

Toasters have thrown almost the full stencil repertoire at their racy looking machine, flames and flying stones in the form of buff toasters, abstract toaster parts and dayglo toasters spew out from the tyres of their car, there is no shyness about bold colours here. See how many toaster parts you can spot!

Toasters

The average man on East London council estate if pressed to identify the piece of graffiti he notices most often would almost certainly recollect “them teef wiv the pink gums”. Not content with just a car to batter, Sweet toof has boldly gone “all car park” producing a myriad of lenticular faces across several successive pillars, not to mention teef, teef and more teef everywhere.

Sweet Toof

Sweet Toof seems capable of transforming any paintable surface into a sickly sweet menace of teef, check the wing mirrors, the Merc badge and out of shot even a fire hose reel has been subjected to the slack jawed toof decay thing. Sweet Toof’s pimp mobile looks like it is venting pink vapours into the gloom of the roof as it positively glows with marshmallowness, has pink ever managed to look so malevolent?

Sweet Toof

Part 1 of this reflection on Banger Art closes with a selection of photos from ace snapper HowAboutNo. Part 2 will be with you in the next couple of days, you may anticipate more stunning photos and highlights from the St Peters Estate bunker.

UPDATE - Part 2 featuring Pablo Delgado, Aida, Will Barras, Matt Small and others here (opens in new window)

Matt Small, Aida, Sweet Toof

Pablo Delgado, Sweet Toof

Dan Hillier

Jorge Rodriquez-Gerada

More delicious HowAboutNo photos in a flickr set here