On another trip to London I took photos of all this stuff in Shoreditch – all within 10 minutes of each other. Apparently they are doing walking tours of the street art in the surrounding area – there’s such a concentration of it. The locals take this stuff for granted and get the chance to form a kaleidoscope of opinions on the matter, but for me, who has only seen a few stencilled rabbits pop up a few years back in Lufbra, it is a treat. Plus it’s not my wall they’re painting on…
A typical space invader mosaic, missing an ear unfortunately, by Invader:
Right next to this one by Alex Senna:
Round the corner from here, is some not so great stuff:
But opposite is the gate which had the ‘One day I’d had Enough’ piece on. This has now been painted over with a rather more jaunty number:
This gate was open so I strolled in and took a picture of the messy bus in the ‘courtyard’:
and an enormous picture by Fintan Magee:
I was asked to go away by a vaguely disgruntled man. At which point I strolled over to The Griffin pub to see what I thought in my previous post was going to be a completed Martin Ron piece:
“Pretty sure now it was Martin Ron at work. The resulting image was of a London guardsman doing a one-handed handstand with his red coat hung up and his bearskin hat on, but it was only sketchy when I saw it,” is what I said.
Wrong! It is –
REIGN!! by Cyrcle
I have done a rather poor composite of two pictures to give you an idea of the scale. So now my claim to fame is that I saw this with Siggy in progress at the start of March when they were painting all the little dots in the pissing rain. Cyrcle are an American duo / collective from Los Angeles and it was raining again when I went to see the mural which is best viewed standing on your head. But that would’ve meant putting my bald patch in a wet patch and I wasn’t willing to suffer for someone else’s art. hey… here’s an idea – turn your screen upside down.
Ian Stevenson’s work on the left, which was right next door to where the Cyrcle mural was in progress in March, has now been overpainted by Mysterious Al. I’m not convinced it’s an improvement, but that’s the nature of this art form. Graffiti as an art form discuss… or don’t; I don’t think the artists really give a monkeys.
One of the chaps I met in London told me that big companies are now paying street artists to paint stuff for them to advertise their products. I wish he hadn’t told me that. It totally goes against the anti-establishment spirit of graffiti imho and made me a little sad.
Thanks again to JL for helping to attribute some artists to works.
Feel free to set me right in the comments below!
couchmagpie 