Hit Shot Walls July 2013

photos: HowAboutNo
words: NoLionsInEngland

July had to man up to follow the excellent street art Shoreditch has seen in the past few months and boy did it deliver.  Things cannot get more manly than having Luther on the BBC swagger around in front of street art and graffiti performing miraculous feats of apparent teleporting from one spot to another in a gritty East London TV cop drama.  Among many receiving product placement name checks were the TRP crew out on the Wick, Obit and 616.

July sees a double gold medal awarded to Francisco de Pajaro aka Street Art Is Trash for both top new name to Graffoto AND top keeping it real ephemeral street art.  NoLions wrote a guest blog very recently about this exciting artist for the scene's global daily news spinner Vandalog.  No sooner did he write "no commercial agenda at all", the very next day a gallery announces a "Art Is Trash" show.  Time to despair!

A name we don't come across often is Ian Stevenson who is responsible for the "Just Look At THis" mural. Predictably some wag with long arms edited the "HIS" part of the mural to "ITS" but it was rapidly changed back, and we chanced upon Mr Stevenson one day bouncing around behind Leonard St painting big sloppy white grins on dumpsters.

Art Is Trash v. unknown - a nice use of street furniture and modification of an existing paste up:

Another new name working in a Swoon/Elbow toe/Armsrock style is Vytautus:

Alex Dias painstakingly painted this elephant/octopus hybrid on a permissioned wall on Hanbury St, the detail in the ink painting is incredible and it was impressive to see the background be added after the main beast was painted without painting over its edges.

Graff writing has been making a re-appearance in Shoreditch again, here WOT has produced a burn baby burn fill over a Probs aerosol abstract wispiness

More Probs asbtract aerosol spray with a toyist response from unknown

We haven't seen Jumbo aka Jumboism up on walls around this parish for quite a while so it has been nice to track a variety of stickers suggesting he/she has visited recently

Miss Van's work is awesome and she lined up with Ciro Schu and Pure Evil to paint a burning wall in Shoredditch and because I think you lot see too much of that kind of stuff on the internet already, I'm not going to show the breasts in this mural.

ACE:

EINE - still up and it was sunny, only took me 6 months to get this shot.

Classic Zomby character and Fuel letters, perhaps in response to some bizarre accusations on the net regarding certain commercial interests sponsoring the dogging of street art murals

Sheryo and the Yok, New York's finest were around in connection with the "Above The Rail" show from the White Canvas Project guys, We're not sure they did anything substantial on the London streets but it was nice to catch the odd sticker or two.

Two cultures cohabiting alongside eachother!

You'd have to be blind to not have seen that Shoreditch has been battered by Above stickers and luckily he completed one nice shutter before he continued his international perambulations to, errrrr, Hastings. All other shutters except the first Brick Lane one were on the coast.

Hit Shot Walls June 2013

June was a bumper month for activity around Graffoto towers, not least dry conditions meant casting aside  essential foul weather gear to find something cool but not overly flesh revealing!

All photos: HowAboutNo

Local scene stalwart and Signal Gallery co-owner Dale Grimshaw produced a range of stunning large murals and smaller paste ups.

    DALE GRIMSHAW

Nice to see Narcélio Grud back in London, up alongside the Twombly-esque Sliks, seen partly complete in this shot.

    NARCÉLIO GRUD & SLIKS

The popular and affable RUN, one of London's favourite adopted Italians outside the worlds of football and bunga bunga is no stranger to the Village Underground walls but this cracking swan was epic  in scale, probably the largest painting we have seen from him in this country.

    RUN

Jana and JS returned to London and with a number of permission walls in effect were able to go very large with a couple of self portrait stencil murals but we found the placement of their smaller paste ups stunning.

    JANA & JS

National rag The Guardian has had few weeks getting conspiratorially excited over leaks and revelations courtesy of Mr E Snowden which convince us that the USA's National Security Agency is reading every pithy tweet and bitchy private message, T.WAT came up with this very timely skit on America being all ears.  Then of course we found that the un-authorised snooping in the UK was even more rampant, no surprise there.

    T.WAT & OTHER

Paul Insect continued his highly productive run of paste ups.

    PAUL INSECT

    HiN

Some say this is by Ronzo but we're not convinced.  No reason to say it's not Ronzo, though we'd have expected the baseball cap motif to be a capital R.  Either way, it's a damn fine paste up

    UNKNOWN

A looming wall crisis in Shoreditch is forcing artists with permissioned mural gigs to paint as far away as 10 yards off Brick Lane on smaller and smaller walls.

    BAILON

    KYLE HUGHES-ODGERS

Curious phonetic challenge reading the name on this artist new to our eyes, do you say "Frah" or "Franarchy"? Another artist completely new to us but some of the pure stencil items we located by FR.A are quite stunning.

    .frA

    

   

   .frA

    .frA

    .frA

Blog mucker NoLionsinEngland is familiar with the work of INO from Athens and reports that this little beauty is actually quite modest by INO's standards but its great to see another quality artist coming out of Greece.

    INO

    HiN

    

    BEST EVER

D*Face "New World Disorder at Stolen Space

Stolen Space Gallery
Old Truman Brewery, London

7 Jun - 23 Jun


D*Face's stunning show closes tomorrow (Sun 23 Jun, 2013) and with it, Stolen Space pulls down the shutters on its current location until it re-surfaces somewhere else.   Below is a small selection of photos from around the show and Arrested Motion kindly let us do a post on their blog which gives all praise and glory in Graffoto's usual style to this epic and wonderful show.  Check out the review we wrote for Arrested Motion here.

Hit Shot Walls May 2013

All photos: NoLionsInEngland


May was a busy month for street artists and photographers of street art. London has been blessed by visits from a plethora of overseas street art stars, let’s start with a few shots of work by an artist new to us, Dede who is reported to come from Israel. Dede’s paste ups were all nice, original and well placed but specially noteworthy were the huge quantity of evidently handmade (screenprinted?) individual stickers


DEDE



DEDE


Also from Israel, regular recent visitors Unga and Tant of Broken Fingerz crew popped back to Shoreditch recently to paint some naked chicks on bikes with big handle bars stuff. It’s what decaying disused doorways are for really.


BROKEN FINGAZ


The international invasion turned intergalactic with the arrival of Space Invader, whose Earth base is in France.


SPACE INVADER


SPACE INVADER


London always welcomes Belgian artist ROA and this month he obliged with two of his finest large scale murals. One located on South Bank must by dint of the nature of the tourist spot and also the heavy traffic on passing railway lines be in with a shout of being his most eyeballed ever, while the other in a grim alleyway is far from the beaten track for anyone other than winos, junkies and street art photographers.


ROA



ROA (detail)


DALeast and Mrs DALeast, herself more commonly known as Faith47, arrived to decorate various walls around Shoreditch. DALeast ran a cheeky little competition for the first 50 people to photograph all 7 pieces he did in London, the twist being the 7th one is located on private property behind locked doors and I can testify that a polite knock earns a frosty reception, so no image here of that particular holy grail.


DALeast



FAITH47


Yola is another artist previously unheard of who visited London and put up some large scale paste-up. Whilst this particular wall has been running for far longer that is healthy in an active street art scene, we weren’t impressed with the lack of respect in papering over this DScreet/Cept collab on Bacon St. On the other hand, this may possibly be a symptom of the pressure on space these days with so many spots reserved for curated/permissioned street art.


YOLA over Dscreet



YOLA


South Coast native Shuby visited London and revealed a complete potty-mouthed approach to letterpress paste ups though frankly who’s surprised, surely you remember the “knickers” portraits from a couple of years ago?


SHUBY


Early in the month we located a cluster of Lad stickers by The London Police but the star find were these custom kicks done in “get your chems here” boots over the telephone wires style.


THE LONDON POLICE


Not all invasions were intergalactic, Kid Acne brought a fresh wave of his Bouddica referencing Stabby Women to various front doors.


KID ACNE


At some point local hero Benjamin Murphy did this stab through the heart though we only found it in May so it qualifies for this months’ HSW.


BENJAMIN MURPHY (artist formerly known as AD/SO?)


An all too infrequent visit to Hackney Wick for a whistlestop shutter clicking frenzy yielded a cluster of ballerinas by spraycan impressionist and rude tagger Neoh.


NEOH



NEOH

Many London graff photographers have got used to popping in to the Kings Court car park to photograph the high spec spraycan artistry available there on a fairly good turnover. However, about 6 months ago the moody bastard on the gate who I always made a point of checking in with said "no photographs on weekdays, punters don’t like it; weekends only”. More recently this became "no photographers at all", a point reinforced with a laminated notice displayed at the gate. You can take spray paint into the car park but not camera lenses???? Cue our community’s applause and general mirth at Malabrocca’s huge fuck-off notice directly opposite. Apart from the dig at the car park proprietor’s, there is of course the irony that documenting the art breaches its prohibition, ho ho.


MALABROCCA


MALABROCCA


We have been hugely impressed with Jonesy’s use of street art to promote environmental awareness and score political points. This seemingly unique piece appears to show an over-furry figure with a stunted tree growing out of his head squatting behind a begging bowl, so while we like the art its meaning has us a little baffled.



JONESY

Aida’s fluorescent cheebra’s, half zebra, half cheetahs have been popping up in a few locations, curiously they always seem to yield good photo opportunities which reflects good placement.


AIDA


I mentioned this was a busy month for photographers what with 2 street art photography shows and a debate on the nature of the incestuous relationship between street art and photography, there is also the small matter of the Street Art Photography Workshops which I want to brazenly plug here. The essence of the idea is spending about an hour talking through tips, hints and ideas for photographing street art with the aid of a slide show then to go out onto the Shoreditch streets to play with the wide range of opportunities for street art phototgraphy. The feedback has been pretty awesome and the workshops continue. Check HERE for updated news and schedule. Plug over. For this time.