Hit Shot Walls March 2013

All photos: NoLionsInEngland

Not making any promises that this will become a regular feature but....here are some musings on and pics of street art and graffiti which happened to catch our eye around London recently.

Sweet Toof and Insect knocked up some gorgeous paste ups and papered a broad swath of London’s East End. Choosing photogenically distressed spots to get up, Sweet Toof went for a slightly less lurid pink version of his characteristic gums whilst Insect churned out a range of floppy eared mouse characters with colourful highlights, a reprise of a Hendrix zombie and a barcode coffin wake.








OBIT is on a roll and you can find his stickers and paste ups all over London but in the past week he took on the shutters on a well known bric-a-brac den on Brick Lane, his subject matter reflecting the three organs which come to most harm in Graffoto's obsession with the wondrous beauty of street art (and lavish art openings with free beer).


KGS, Allintha, Obey (modified),Obit


What was interesting to see was KGS getting the crew name high and loud in this street art central location, more power to them. In a world gone mural-loco with several organisations competing to pass permission slips into the hand of any visiting artist who is willing to play the mutual promotion painting game, illegal street art has really been marginalised over the past 18 months. Good to see people willing to grow a pair and get up high and illegal along this mural mile. Compare the above shot with the same spot just a few days earlier, noting by comparison KGS’s comedy modification of the Obey at the far end.


Kata, D7606/Gee Street Art, Unknown, Mobstr, Unga, Allintha, Obey


ACE’s London centric paste-ups have been a firm favourite with Graffoto for many years and despite hectic preps for a recent solo show in LA, ACE managed to add many prime specimens of his mashed up beauty to walls around London






Graffoto first came across Italian ALO one cold evening just over 2 years ago as he put up a few modest paste ups on his first outing to hit the streets of London. While his the energy of his vibrantly coloured portrait imagery was evident even on first sighting, he has recently been finding quiet spots to paint and paste in situ on larger scale to beguiling effect. This particular shot captures the chance moments that crop up as a photographer; with my non viewfinder eye open I could see this girl approaching and thought she’d add interest to the shot but I never imagined her lips, teeth and particularly the grey hat would so magically mirror ALO’s portrait, a lucky bonus. With slogans such as “Deceit”, “Loser” and “Frustration” juxtaposed with his female figures, we wonder if the young, male, Italian artist is allowing some biographical detail to influence his imagery.


ALO (modified/dogged by Endless)





We’re not sure if Kate hangs out in the East End but, avoiding the obvious gag with the juxtaposition of the two paste ups here, we like to think that our favourite screen printer Aida is reflecting on the post Olympics legacy with her modified message here.




Dee One has kept up a high output, I particularly liked this mashed up portrait of Cameron with Dee Devils for brains.


Dee One, D7606/Gee Street Art


The telephone boxes in the shot above started appearing in London late last year. Iconic females including Liz Taylor, Princess Diana, Audrey Hepburn, Barbara Windsor, Sam Fox and errr, Rhianna amongst others are trapped within pop art multiple telephone box paste ups (and the occasional tardis) that look lush on the street. The guy has his mojo and is rocking it hard. Collabs with street artists such as Gee Street Art and 616 seem to be his latest twist not to mention an increase in size as can be seen in the earlier shot of the Brick lane bric-a-brac cabin.




D7606/Gee Street Art, St8ment


Mentioning Gee Street Art, he/they have been among the hardest working street artists over the past winter. At the moment he is mostly making his mark with paste-ups though this multilayered stencil with its free hand reflection is just the way street art should be. He has also put on a street art show out in the provinces which opened this week, sadly we couldn’t make it.




616 doesn’t seem happy unless he has at least 1 new idea each week and recently it was a delight to find him putting up small captioned Polaroid collages, you don’t need permission and a 30 by 8 foot shutter to make an impact round here.






Last year the only 3 warm weeks we had outside the Olympic period were reserved for Jo Peel’s Holywell Lane stop motion mural. This year inside the Foundry Car Park she had to endure 3 weeks of finger freezing weather, hats off to anyone prepared to work outdoors high and hold cold cans for that length of time. We look forward to seeing the resulting stop motion this year, assuming camera operators’ shivers didn’t blur the photos.




Yesterday Graffoto had the pleasure of a couple of hours in the company of master snapper Art Of TheState. His un-erring eye sniffed out a couple of C215’s whose location we weren’t aware of, these are a couple of months old. Isn’t the year flying by.




This final flick is a piece found yesterday, no idea how old it is or who the creative genius was but it made us chuckle.




To those hardly souls undeterred by the brass monkey weather of the past few weeks, whose un-curated art has added beauty to London streets, we salute you!


Linkytron:

616

ACE
 Aida
ArtOfTheState flickr
ArtOfTheState website
C215 flickr
D7606 flickr
Jo Peel
Mobstr
Obey
Paul Insect 
Sweet Toof

Nathan Ford's latest work

Last summer as I walked into the 2012 BP Portrait Award in the National Portrait Gallery to see Nathan Ford’s entry ‘Joachim’, a tiny 28 x 20 cm canvas, I was immediately struck by its hanging and also by the surrounding competition. It was hung rather apologetically between 2 enormous canvases, and demanded the visitor get up close and personal with it. It also deserved to be given a little time.

In terms of the 54 other competitors, listeners to Mark Kermode’s film reviews will have heard his oft repeat mantra about the ‘death of narrative cinema’. Well, the BP Award seemed to be the insipid death of figurative portraiture as row upon row of large ‘perfect’ portraits gave you everything on a plate; the subject gazing into the artist’s easel, and photorealism becoming an over-used one trick pony. Given that there were 2,187 entries, I wondered if Nathan really was the only painter in the world who saw the possibilities of the portrait format rather than its limitations, or whether it was merely the judges who couldn’t see beyond their paint brushes?

Given this I looked forward to Nathan’s bi-ennial solo exhibition at Beaux Arts in Bath. 

Please click on the photos for larger versions. They really do deserve to be seen in the flesh if you can make it.
　

'Butterfly Affectation’ by Nathan Ford

When I was about 14 my art teacher told me I’d never be much cop at art as it looked like technical drawing (which I was actually good at).  Unfortunately he was right.

Nathan though has a huge amount of talent in both applications, and in his recent paintings he has been leaving in his ‘calculations’ and more of his draftsman’s markings, whilst also demonstrating the painterly ability and free thinking he has in profusion.

As Nathan’s family has enlarged / began to grow up, he seems to feature them more and more. Of the paintings with recognisable people in them only 3 are not of his wife, children or parents.   In addition, several of his cityscapes seem to be inspired by the Norwood / Crystal Palace area of London where he grew up as a child.  To say that Nathan is having a mid-life crisis would certainly be over the top, but he does seem to be ruminating a lot on existence, his childhood haunts, and whether his sons will be able to grow up in this increasingly cruel world.

 ‘South Circular’ by Nathan Ford

'Plateau' by Nathan Ford

For several years now Nathan‘s urban scapes have often featured his children seemingly lost and vulnerable in busy metropolitan thoroughfares that belittle them, as though their lives are fleeting and disposable.  Of these new paintings ‘Plateau’ is the most clearly ‘perilous’ in its urgency as his young son hovers at the edge of a tube platform.  His other canvases often present a more ‘real’ danger to me though, as there is something unreal about ‘Plateau‘; as though this is only perceived danger.  The platform is empty, which even on Boxing Day is never achieved in London, and on the opposite platform just two solitary men loiter, with seemingly no inquisitiveness in the abandoned tot.  The concourse behind looks empty (and incidentally rather looks like Baker Street or Edgware Rd) and even the advertising boards only have old ripped paper on them.  This therefore has the feel of one of those abandoned tube stations, like Aldwych, and is surely more of a dream or an apocalyptic vision than a reality?  A ‘monster’ is ready to devour the iconic ‘Underground’ sign on the wall, and the peeling hoardings have innocent drawings on them; a sign that Nathan’s children are certainly well and truly safe, and have been  drawing on his paintings again!

'Boundary Wall (study)' by Nathan Ford

If you ever wondered what goes on in the minds of young boys then Nathan’s new proclivity for letting his two boys doodle on his paintings seems to suggest that if you are ever on Family Fortunes your top 4 answers should be that young boys mostly think about  deep sea troglodyte fish, monsters, big teeth, and stickmen who look a little like the spaced out children’s TV character ‘Bod’. And before anyone says ‘Dran’, Nathan had never seen his work before letting his kids loose on his own meticulous work.

'The Triangle' by Nathan Ford

The danger works best in ‘The Triangle’ as additional inferences bestow a sense of foreboding.  His boys, as usual, are walking away from the viewer (or the painter...), and there is no hint of a good Samaritan who might stop to enquire about the welfare of these two little poppets walking in the middle of a road.   The ’one way street’ signs light up to suggest they are walking into a void, and the CCTV camera is pointing the wrong way; doing nothing to put the viewers mind at rest. 

 'Incoming’ by Nathan Ford

'Pricetown’ by Nathan Ford

 

’Hurricane Terrence’ (left) and ’Samuel’ (right)  by Nathan Ford

Although the sparkling, exploding paintings like ‘Butterfly Affectation’ and ‘South Circular’ may (rightly) grab the attention, there is no amount of subtlety in the small, dim landscapes such as ‘Incoming’ and ‘Pricetown’, and there are also withering, bursting caricatures in ’Samuel’ and ’Hurricane Terrence’, all 4 of which strangely remain in the very exclusive club of ‘unsold paintings‘.   It sadly seems as though buyers don’t want the murky and secretive landscapes, or the ’wild’ looking portraits, even though I would humbly suggest the later in particular show Nathan’s inner angst and technical fluency the most lucidly.

'Flock' by Nathan Ford

‘Flock’ is a rare pastoral painting, but is also technically a portrait, as curious sheep try to gang up on the painter, their faces emerging out of the flickering twilight in various forms of readiness, as if they are made of wax melting on the austere hillside.

'Reuben 1.13’ (left) and ‘Joachim 8.12’ (right)  by Nathan Ford

They say that ‘the eyes are the window of the soul’. If that is true then Nathan’s numerous small portraits force you to gaze straight into the inner sanctum of a person’s psyche, as often only an eye is ‘finished’ and the rest is inferred, sketched or incomplete, rather like how you think you know someone but really they don’t even totally know themselves and are still incomplete and deficient.   ‘Flies’ buzz around the sitter’s heads. Rage and anger explodes in a few of them.   Quiet melancholy abounds in others, and Nathan’s sketch marks sometimes make it feel like you can see the plates that make up the crazy paving of a broken skull.

There is one double page spread in the catalogue where the paintings of Nathan’s children make you feel like you are looking in to the eyes of Anna and Nathan themselves.   ‘Reuben 1.13’ has the doe eyed gaze of his mother, and ‘Joachim 8.12’ has the slightly melancholic face of his father, plus the family penchant for males attired in a hat. It is a shame that they are not also hung together, but that is a minuscule bleat amongst this exceptional exhibition.

Nathan Ford's exhibition is on at Beaux Arts in Bath, until 6^th April 2013. Entry is free. http://www.beauxartsbath.co.uk

Rae – Nocturnal Trips

Signal Gallery
Paul St, London
25 Jan – 16 Feb 2013

Photos: NoLionsInEngland except Brooklynite Gallery where stated



This week I had the pleasure of showing Hraq Vartigan, co-founder and editor of Hyperallergic the state of play in Shoreditch’s art. I re-learnt an awful lot myself in the process, not least of which was how enriched our walls are by the work of distinguished foreign visitors. The latest overseas artist to add international colourful and flavour to our grimy east end state is NY's Rae, over for his first solo London show at Signal Gallery.


Rae, NY, photo by: Brooklynite Gallery


Examination of various flickr feeds reveals a prodigious talent for quirky and ramshackle sculptural assemblages pinned to poles, walls and other street furniture. Chaotic combination of found objects are fixed together to create madcap boxy characters, in RAEs world no material combination or colour clash is off limits. Thus far his contribution to the colour of London’s scenery has been limited to paste-ups. Good friend Hookedblog surmises that to prepare his street work requires a few days scouring the streets for objects and raw materials which he hasn’t had time for since arrival to prepare for the show. Personally I can’t see why a travelling international artist can’t rely on his gallerists for a few weeks advanced dumpster diving ;-)


Rae, NY, photo by: Brooklynite Gallery


RAE wears his NY influences quite openly, one composition tips its hat to Faile’s dog, the angular arms and indeed intestinal tracts of the characters nod to Skewville and a huge flamboyant swirling waft of the cloak lays at the feet of Basquiat. Dude’s from NY, so why not. To be fair, rumour has it that Rae is a hugely significant figure on the NY street art and gallery scene beyond just his artistic involvement.


Love Your Bus Driver


The characters are energetic, slightly naive and flat. They cavort and distort in a way that encourages long pleasurable moments disentangling what might actually be happening in the canvas. The chopped up faces with their bent noses and flattened mouths may suggest a tribal cubism with dots.


Panic

Outline characters which bring to mind nothing more than the NY subway chalk on black paper graffiti of Keith Haring are tiled in many of Rea's prints and canvases. A cluster of them sneak into his version of The Green Lady, aptly if not jauntily titled Tertchikoff Rip Off, as if we might not notice the Haring-esque interlopers.


Tertchikoff Rip Off


A couple feature a beaten copper border which lend the paintings some kind of iconostasis effect. Rae’s handiness with a bit of sculptural metal on canvas is echoed several other pieces such as this NY Gossip. Is that bucket-helmet echoing the get-my-tin-hat “I’m going to say this just to provoke you” chatroom staple?


NY Gossip


The big picture is that Rae’s work looks beautiful. Discussing Rae’s visual DNA leads to many quality names being dropped, think Basquiat with fewer words and you have the essence of his appeal. Maybe next time, someone can chuck Rae in a gallery with the contents of a rag-and-bone man’s cart, close the doors for a week and say “install the shit out of that!”


For Your Consideration


More pics in a Flickr photoset here

Links:
Signal Gallery

Brooklynite Gallery

Cranio - Lost In London

Zero Cool Gallery @ Red Bull Studios, London
Nov 16th – 19th 2012

All photos: NoLionsInEngland


Interesting opening in London this week of Cranio’s show “Lost in London” . Interesting because this guy’s work is beautiful, obviously, but also because the question arises “how come we see so little Brazilian street art talent in the UK?”


Cranio, DScreet (detail)


After loving Cranio’s work by proxy on the net for the past 4 years it was a great thrill when his presence in London was recently revealed by the whiff of spraypaint on Brick Lane.




A few nights later, more Cranio work appeared in Hackney Wick.


Cranio, Sweet Toof


Several other shutters have been painted and most recently, we chanced upon him again decorating the outside of a Brazilian restaurant on Rivington St.




The gallery show is a straight forward hand of some ten or so cartoon portraits, compositions featuring our hero lost among totemic London iconography and some Brazilian surrealism.


2012


Hitting The New Beast


Cranio’s figures are Brazilian rainforest Indians painted wearing their party suits – blue body paint and solid red stripes across their eyes. Solid black across the eyes means war apparently. The two streams of coherence running through this show concern Brazilians on the lash and a Brazilian writer getting up in London.


Portrait I

The paintings are actually a record of Cranio’s despair at the fate of the rainforest Indians who sell up their land for deforestation and with the loot go and party with western hairstyles, western goods but no realisation that the deal bartered away their culture as well as their homelands.


Consumerist Turist


Speaking of Brazilians in London, back to that question, why so few Brazilians in the UK? The Os Gemeos twins did a couple of huge commissions a few years back but I don’t recall any UK solo shows; Titifreak has been over once or twice (2009, O Contemporary), Milo Tchais is semi-permanent resident but generally we seem to see far fewer visiting Brazilian artists that our friends in USA or mainland Europe. So hats off to Cranio and lovely to see him poking fun at his experience as a Brazilian native painting in London.


Big Bus


The rich and vibrant colours work incredibly well in Cranio’s work outdoors, the characters always pop off dark backgrounds so brighter backgrounds on a few of the canvasses in this show came as a bit of a surprise.


Red Bull Gives You Wings


You may also notice that both on the canvas and outdoors Cranio has avoided full on Pixacao. Cranio’s view is that Pixacao is a true Brazilian culture and it lives only in Brazil. Fair enough, good on him for not exploiting it abroad.


If This Was My Street


One more thing that beggars belief, all the way from Brazil, three or four weeks in town....show open for just four days!

More pics here

Cranio's flicks here