Thursday 8 August 2013

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.








Saturday 13 July 2013

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

Saturday 22 June 2013

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.


D*Face New World Disorder


D*Face FUUCK


D*Face Skateboard Guard of Honour


D*Face Big Boom


D*Face Dot Illusion Room


D*Face Bats and Helmets