Monthly Archives: October 2022

Paste up street art put up for the London International Paste Up Festival Second Edition

London International Paste Up Festival 2

The second edition of the London International Paste Up Festival took place 20-23 October 2022.  Artists from all over the world, about 300 all told, sent in paper-based artwork which the organisers pasted up on a number of walls mainly around the Brick Lane area.

Fashion Street LIPF2

Street art was put up on a total of 7 locations, or 8 if you include the numerous paste ups that accumulated around LIPF HQ on Hanbury Street during the festival opening event.  None of the LIPF2 locations had been used in the inaugural 2021 London International Paste Up Festival.

Seven Stars LIPF2, Brick Lane

In 2021 all the locations bar one were legal, permission had been granted by the owners.  The exception was one wall where the LIPF team thought they had permission but it turned out they were listening to the wrong person!  For 2022 there was no permission and indeed at several spots the apparent wall owners remonstrated with the paste up teams with varying degrees of forcefulness.  At one spot the ground floor occupant harangued the team to be followed by an occupant from the floor above later saying how much they loved the art and the constant change.

Grimsby St LIPF2

In 2021 all the LIPF surfaces were virgin surfaces or tarps tied to walls.  For the second event all bar one of the LIPF walls had long term prior history as paste up street art walls.   The paste up festival waved a transformational wand at each wall, bringing complete more or less change in a single moment to surfaces more accustomed to perpetual evolution through gradual change.   Last year’s art was essentially one layer deep whereas this year LIPF2 looks all the better for layering onto each walls accretion of texture, patina and depth.   Also there were no gaps where original wall surface can be seen.  So this year’s locations just looked more like street art from the wild compared to last year’s festival.

Puma Court LIPF2

Street art lends itself to collaborations, interactions and augmentations.  Emo Ryan screenprints portraits of punk version of Queen Elizabeth  garnished with Jamie Reid/Sex Pistols influenced wording, a recent paste up of the Queen by Silvio Alino had the right scale and similar text providing a perfect juxtaposition.  The lily was well and truly gilded with the later addition of an artificial flower.

Silvio Alino, Emo Ryan and Me and Blue, Hanbury St

Coloquix/Appaaran collaboration for LIPF2

Paste up street art put up for the London International Paste Up Festival Second Edition

Tsunami_Mignonnerie / Raddington Falls interaction

One paste up spot with a long history of street art got the LIPF paste up team into spot of bother with an un-appreciative owner.  Stik painted the Brick Lane Couple on Princelet Street in 2010.  The adjacent wall was decorated in fine style with a succession of stencil images by Otto Schade from 2014 and paste ups really started appearing in large numbers in 2015.   Someone in the property had a tirade against Benjay Crossman in 2019 leading to this sought after artist mulshing out his own art and leaving little doubt as to his feelings towards the owners.  It would appear that the same person objected to the LIPF team decorating this long running spot and scrapped off the paste ups within his reach (short arms, stiff knees?).  In the process of destroying the art he created a truly unsightly mess.   Ironically, within the vague unwritten rules of paste up culture, ripped, torn, peeling and destroyed art gives a free pass to other artists to place fresh art over the desecration.

Princelet Street LIPF2 before the anti art attack

Princelet Street after the art desecration

2019 Benjay Crossman

Tweet_streetart from Melbourne collaborated with Metraeda from Dusseldorf on a balloon breathing faceted dragon.   A barred gate locked to a wall provided appropriate context for several artworks including Palley’s R2D2 which was kept company by a rocket taking David Bowie to heaven and Cultof.XYZ’s “Allow access”.   Old School street artists who submitted artworks included the famous London Police and West London writer CodeFC.

Tweet_streetart & Metraeda

Coloquix/Apparan collaboration for LIPF2

Puma Court – including Jace, 33WallFlower33, Tuby, Broken Hartist, Corrosive8, Cultof.xyz, Knapple

London Police, Uberfubs

Keith Flint and Queen Elizabeth by CodeFC.  Also feaet No.rules art & LT66

Street artists are used to surrendering control over the fate of their art once they leave it on the streets.  The London International Paste Up Festival begs artists to relinquish more, they are absent from the placement process.  On the whole, with the exception of some artists who assisted with the pasting up or who attended some of the events in person, the gift of placement was in the hands of the team who spent many days pasting art on the walls.  The aesthetic of the resulting walls was determined by opportunist interactions, intentional and chance colour combinations and a preference for chaotic randomness rather than disciplined straight edged borders and overlaps.

The Viaduct – early stages

The Viaduct LIPF2

Homo Riot, Vision Ox, Oddo, Punk Flamungo, Raffaele Giovani, DaddyStreetFox, TFA, Vermin, Pissandvinegar art, fiftyseven designs,Slow Shrug,  Grimsby St, LIPF2

So.Schoen.Immer.Weider, Cameron twins, Hello The Mushroom, Taxed, Olly Walker, Apparan, Zelda Bomba at Puma Court

The LIPF2 spots are live and active street art locations, they remained dynamic and constantly changing even over the period of the Festival itself as new art was added by artists.  K-Guy had been a participant in the 2021 LIPF but in 2022, having not managed to get ready in time for the submission deadline decided the best means of getting involved was simply to pop up and add his contributions himself.  Those contributions were themselves subject to very rapid augmentation by another reliable contributor to the Shoreditch street art smorgasbord, Alex Arnell.

K-Guy

Fashion St

People immersed in the street art scene, in particular the practitioners, the artists may ponder what gives someone the right to take over whole walls and go over existing art in the name of a festival.   Specially one in which very few of the participants are active in the installation, necessitating an element that might be construed as curation.  If there is a conceit at the heart of the method, the actual achievement in elevating the appreciation and status of paste up street art justifies it.

Princelet St Oct 2022 pre LIPF

Princelet Street LIPF2

Shoreditch Street Art Tours had the pleasure a few years back of introducing the artist Apparan who is one of the main organisers involved in conceiving, managing and generally pulling off the London International Paste Up Festival to the charity Urban Heart Guate.  Urban Heart Guate promotes various forms of therapy including art to support a better life and environment for young children growing up in communities in Guatemala blighted by poverty, crime and gang violence.  A free street art tour by Shoreditch Street Art Tours on the last afternoon of LIPF2 raised donations to support the work of Urban Heart Guate.   The official link to contribute via LIPF to this fabulous cause can be found HERE

The organisers of the London Paste Up Festival are continuing to raise funds in support and have partnered with Pepita Coffee to raise funds from purchases of reusable coffee tins packed with luxury ground coffee and featuring a collage of photos of LIPF1 art, they look stunning!

Collectors edition Pepita ground coffee for for the London International Paste Up Festival Second Edition

Collectors Edition Paste Up Festival coffee jar by Pepita Coffee

Message London International Paste Up Festival on Instagram for more details on how to get your mitts on one of these beauties.

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With apologies to the 300 artists who participated in LIPF2, it would be wonderful to provide links to all artists or indeed to identify everyone whose art features in the photographs in this summary but sadly this isn’t practical.

The 2nd London International Paste Up Festival was supported by:

Shoreditch Street Art Tours

Brick Lane Shisha Lounge

Great Art UK

Inspiring City

Pepita Coffee

La Tundra Revista

All photos: Dave Stuart


City Kitty, RX Skulls, Toastoro, Voxx Romana and Wrdsmth visited Shoreditch with a group of street artists from Portland and New York and created original street art

Portland and NY Street Artists visit Shoreditch

This August a group of street artists from Portland, Oregon as well as their friends from other endz visited Shoreditch to bless the public realm with their creativity.   Various combinations of this group have been visiting Europe regularly over the years and the street art they create is never short of impressive.

City Kitty, RX Skulls, Toastoro, Voxx Romana and Wrdsmth

Gang mural (above and feature image) : City Kitty, RX Skulls, Toastoro, Voxx Romana and local friend Wrdsmth

RX Skulls and Voxx Romana have been at the centre of the previous manifestations of this team, on this occasion they were joined by City Kitty from New York, Toastoro from Portland and team photographer Cody Keto.

Toastoro and RX Skulls

Cat Bus Toaster by Toastoro, Chonk by RX Skulls (also feat Boxitrixi, ODDO, DaddyStreertFox)

Each artist has embraced differing themes and influences yet there is commonality in the techniques, placements and energy.   Paste ups, stencil, stickers and various installations are all deployed in the name of public decoration, sometimes in adventurous and novel ways.

Voxx Romana

My name is Voxx Romana, observe my stencil

Toastoro

Toastoro stencilled paste up

RX Skulls is one of the best known art sticker makers around and he came prepared with masses of stickers, as well as paste ups and stencils.

RX Skulls

RX Skulls paste up

RX Skulls

RX Skulls sticker

RX Skulls, Voxx Romana/Vane PDX collab, Toastoro (also feat D7606, Slow Shrug)

Visible in the very corner of the photo above is a small RX Skulls paste up on the corner of the window ledge, a relic from 2018 which can be seen in its early days in the photo below.   Also visible in the following photo is a sculpture by 3x3x3 and a paste up from C3, C3 is one of the UK artists RX skulls has collaborated with and if you look closely above you can see the carbonised remains of that C3 in the layers of historic grime.

RX Skulls vs C3 also feat 3x3x3, 2018

Which leads to the next photo in which another aspect of the art practice of this posse is apparent, their enthusiasm for an art collaboration.  A collection of conjoined skeleton RX Skulls characters called the Chonks are seen in partnership with art from his UK friends D7606 and C3.  The Chonkening reflects RX’s intention to cram in tons of movies this year, don’t we all have an accumulated cinema deficit following the pandemic?  Another conjoined couple are off on a tattoo spree with a tattoo gun.

RX Skulls & C3; RX Skulls & D7606

RX Skulls & C3; RX Skulls & D7606

RX Skulls

RX Skulls wall of fame

In a lovely gesture RX gave a number of stickers which were hugely appreciated by guests of the Shoreditch Street Art Tour.

RX Skulls stickers

By the way, sticker placement at seriously impressive height was achieved using a special applicator I have seen on the net but never seen in action before.

Toastoro

Toastoro sticker

Voxx Romana came similarly prepared and perhaps most striking were his collaborations with Danny Ebru who provided the marbled paper background to Voxx Romana’s stencils, something Voxx brought with him on his previous visit.  The backgrounds are simply delicious.

Voxx Romana & Danny Ebru

Voxx Romana & Danny Ebru collaboration

Voxx Romana & Danny Ebru

Voxx Romana & Danny Ebru collaboration

Voxx Romana & Danny Ebru

Voxx Romana & Danny Ebru collaboration

Voxx Romana & Danny Ebru

Voxx Romana & Danny Ebru collaboration

Voxx got inventive with stencils wrapped around corners, borrowed background colours complement the stencilled definition of the face as if the whole thing was a single original collaborative art piece.

Voxx Romana

Voxx Romana 90 degree stencil

Another returning member was the collaboration machine City Kitty.  City Kitty focusses more on hand painted paste ups rather than print runs and consequently gets up fewer pieces than the other guys.   City Kitty does the street art podcast Scratching The Surface which is so damn good, several recent episodes were interviews recorded on this European foray.   If you are interested in the sticker arm device mentioned above then listen to all of City Kitty’s podcasts, one of them is with the artist whose side hustle is selling those poles.

City Kitty

City Kitty

City Kitty

City Kitty

Toastoro, whose pseudonym is a fusion of the word “toast” and the name of Studio Ghibli animation character “Totoro”, has had art up in Shoreditch in the past courtesy of friends putting him up but this visit really marked his first overseas in-person “campaign”.  Toastoro introduced two art techniques rarely seen in London street art: LED illuminated street art (hold tight Lost Hills) and layered art which Toastoro calls vinyl topography, the textured layered effect is hard to relive or convey through “mere” photographs.

Toastoro

Literally lit Toastoro

Toastoro

Toastoro vinyl topography

Toastoro

Toastoro vinyl topography

The Studio Ghibli reference implicit in the compound name Toastoro influences his subject matter which included sightings of Totoro (obvs) with a body shaped rather like a slice of bread, susawatari dust bunnies and funniest of all, a souped up cat bus (“My Neighbour Totoro”) with added toaster functionality.

Toastoro

susuwatari pavement stencils by Toastoro

Toastoro

Cat Bus Toaster by Toastoro

Toastoro visited Shoreditch with a group of street artists from Portland and New York and created original street art

Toastoro sticker

Voxx, RX and Toastoro all felt pavement stencilling was in order, something Voxx Romana and RX Skulls have done in Shoreditch on previous visits.

RX Skulls & Voxx Romana

RX Skulls & Voxx Romana pavement stencils

RX Skulls

Pavement Stencil by RX Skulls

Toastoro

Toastoro pavement stencil

The boys from Portland also put out some #FreeArt.  RX Skulls became only the second street artist I can recall putting out bronze street art.

RX Skulls

RX Skulls

Accompanying the street artists was the amazing and super cool photographer Cody Keto.  While out one evening the group bumped into Stik, a chance encounter which gave Cody the opportunity to create some amazing light trail photographs at Stik’s famous Hoxton Couple statue.  Cody has kindly given permission for his stunning photos to appear here.

RX Skulls, Voxx Romana, Toastoro and Stik

Portland guys vs Stik with Stik guest appearance. Photo courtesy Cody Keto Photography

Cody Kato and Toastoro

Catching Brick Lane Action – (behind) Cody Keto and (closer)Toastoro

The love extended to this group of visiting artists is really a reflection of the way they reach out to and embrace the wider world.  This is most apparent in their collaborations, these guys are total collaboration engines and it is not surprising to see them collaborating by design, on opportunity and by chance.

City Kitty and Toastoro

City Kitty/Toastoro cats and bamboo shoot collab (also feat Pablo Fiasco, RSH & an older Mowcka)

City Kitty and Toastoro

City Kitty/Toastoro collab detail

City Kitty & RX Skulls

City Kitty & RX Skulls collaboration

City Kitty hooked up with Neon Savage, the pair having collaborated many times down the years since meeting in Croydon in 2017 a fact gleaned from their podcast conversation on the always excellent City Kitty podcast.

City Kitty & Neon Savage

City Kitty & Neon Savage collab

RX Skulls & Polar Bear

RX Skulls & Polar Bear collaboration

One of the group told us that the highlight of the visits had been the welcome they received in Europe, visits were made to Manchester, Hackney Wick, Paris as well as Shoreditch and Southbank.  There were planned hook-ups as well as chance encounters with street artists and many artists and fans travelled to meet the team.

a group of street artists from Portland and New York and created original street art

Hanging at Montys for the “Bring and buy”

Toastoro

Toastoro at Southbank Undercroft

City Kitty

City Kitty at Southbank Undercroft

RX Skulls

RX Skulls at Southbank Undercroft

Mowcka has previously collaborated with City Kitty and travelled to hook up in Shoreditch.

Toastoro, City Kitty and Mowcka

Toastoro, City Kitty and visiting friend Mowcka

The combination of artists in this travelling circus changes on each visit but fear not, art by absent friends appears courtesy of those who do make the trip.

Vane PDX

Vane PDX (Voxx Romana obliged)

Vane PDX

Vane PDX transparent sticker

Vane’s sticker is printed on a transparent background, Voxx’s placement on Vane’s behalf intentionally responds to the red letterpress print by Jean Peut-Etre.  One of those “chance” collaborations perhaps.

DRSC0

DRSC0 – absent friend

visited Shoreditch with a group of street artists from Portland and New York and created original street art

Eye see Pam Goode – present in spirit

Also making appearances were friends from their local scenes that London did not have the pleasure of welcoming in person this time such as Cheer Up, Cuz Chris and Robots Will Kill

Cheer Up

Cheer Up

Notice the writing of Cheer Up’s name in the glitched font in the face – genius!

Cuz Chris

Cuz Chris

City Kitty & Chris RWK

City Kitty & Chris RWK sticker collaboration

RX Skulls, Chris RWK and Knor

Tracy Blackstock by Dreph admires stickers by RX Skulls and a Chris RWK/Knor collab

This visiting group of artists peppered Shoreditch and other parts of Europe with new street art embodying innovative, novel, collaborative, improvised fun wherever they went.  There were so many dimensions to the art and the activities they got up to and we thank them all for their contribution to the street art scene.

Links:

RX Skulls Instagram

“Art From Arrex. Stick It.”  RX Skulls 2014 stickers in Shoreditch

“Secrets Of The Sticker Shed – Sticker Making Workshop” (How to become RX Skulls)

Voxx Romana instagram

City Kitty instagram 

Toastoro instagram

Cody Keto Photography Website 

RX Skulls

RX Skulls stencil

RX Skulls visited Shoreditch with a group of street artists from Portland and New York and created original street art

RX Skulls stencils