Hanging a new calendar signals a lovely excuse to look back over the best of Shoreditch street art 2022. Here is a slide show of some of the best, there is a full write up on Graffoto, my personal street art blog, which goes into more depth regarding the hows and whys of these highlights.
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Street Art in Penge Rooftop Gallery
We have been aware of a proliferation of street art in Penge for some time but didn’t get the chance to visit until this weekend just gone. This just happened to be the weekend of major Halloween festivities so a lot of the Halloween themed street art was being exhibited to the public for the first time.
There is a full appreciation and some lovely photos on sister blog Graffoto, check out the full story now. The excursion from Shoreditch was well worth while.
Links:
Penge rooftop gallery website
all photos Dave Stuart
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
Message London International Paste Up Festival on Instagram for more details on how to get your mitts on one of these beauties.
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:
All photos: Dave Stuart
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a lovely gesture RX gave a number of stickers which were hugely appreciated by guests of the Shoreditch Street Art Tour.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Voxx, RX and Toastoro all felt pavement stencilling was in order, something Voxx Romana and RX Skulls have done in Shoreditch on previous visits.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Mowcka has previously collaborated with City Kitty and travelled to hook up in Shoreditch.
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’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.
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
Notice the writing of Cheer Up’s name in the glitched font in the face – genius!
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
Felipe Pantone Quick Tide
The annual London Design Festival which is on right now at time of writing presents a dizzying selection of visual indulgences across London and a particularly eye catching one is Quick Tide by Felipe Pantone.
Felipe has been commissioned to add chromatic vibrancy to an outdoors stairway and cantilevered veranda arrangement overlooking the 02 Arena at Greenwich, East London.
Felipe has been seen in Shoreditch in the past painting dazzling abstract spraypainted murals though history is no impediment to a writer of hype, Quick Tide is according to the promoters Felipe’s first commissioned artwork in the UK, why being first in this manner should have any significance is not clear.
The Tide is a work-in-progress 5km elevated walkway along the south bank of the River Thames heading east or, for the Captain Pugwash in you, downstream from North Greenwich and ultimately, when complete, forming a loop around the peninsula returning to the station at North Greenwich which is helpful as you don’t want to be dumped a million miles from civilisation at the end of a 5km wander. It is not a million miles from a purpose built Greenwich version of New York’s High Line. Felipe’s vinyl wrap Quick Tide artwork is a temporary addition to what seem to be a more permanent installation of contemporary sculptures along The Tide trail.
Quick Tide certainly livens up what would otherwise be a fairly bland start to the public walkway. Soft blends and rainbow spectrums in Pantone’s signature style delight the eyes. Felipe has developed a real knack for kinetic dayglow trompe l’oeil art pieces which always make you nod and think…” yessss….clever”. His playful use of interference patterns has made him one of the most interesting contemporary artists to emerge from the graffiti scene.
Quick Tide seems to have been installed for London’s Design Festival which ran 17th – 25th September though it is captioned “Greenwich Peninsula Art Trail” in the LDF guide and that art trail certainly seems to be permanent. Photos of the stairs and cantilevered structure without Pantone’s art show it to be a sterile bland exercise in municipal footpath geometry. The signs are confusing, the signals are unclear, the abstract art deserves to live a bit longer but who can tell whether it survives past this week – to grant such a short life seems a waste and indeed an insult to the creativity that has gone into its conception.
Links:
Felipe Pantone Instagram
Art On The Tide/Greenwich Peninsula/The Peninsulist website
London Design Festival website
all photos: Dave Stuart
Helch – The Dog’s Pollocks
It being that day today, Queen Elizabeth II’s state funeral, I decided to go out graff hunting and what a great decision that turned out to be. “Helch Watch” has been running for several months following the addition of an incomplete piece of graff close to our hood in May.
My fave graff lookout, Lady Nolions, reported back a couple of weeks ago that Helch had returned to transform and complete that piece and it was looking epic. The fills range from fades to stripe via glitches and quilted patterns. The symmetry in the composition is, as per for Helch, impeccable.
After suitably urban looking “context” shots, stepping in close for some close cropped shots revealed a stunning surprise. Helch has gone full Jackson in a ground level oil spill trap and it’s more or less invisible until the moment you fall into it. Helch does brilliant fills generally but this time a new level has been reached.
Another new Helch was found in Shoreditch at the weekend and again the fill looked stunning.
Helch has kind of taken over one end of the road behind the old Truman Brewery, this time the combination of blues and whites in the fill suggest Helch seeks to give nature a run for its money in providing best cloud and sky colours.
Helch has created many more stunning text based artworks in Shoreditch over the past 12 months, consolidating a burgeoning reputation among fans of art as well as graffiti.
Helch instagram
All photos: Dave Stuart
Carnival of Graffiti 2022
Carnival returned to Notting Hill this weekend after a COVID hiatus of 3 years, this meant the return of one of the best and most temporary HOFs (Hall of Fame) going – the Notting Hill Carnival shopfront hoardings.
One person who played a major role in grabbing the head of graffiti and twisting it 180 degrees until became street art was Mode2. The jaw dropping highlight of my exploration of the Carnival graffiti was unexpectedly coming across a new piece by Mode2. Check the Mode2 writing, I have not seen that spidery angular swirl since he painted that old since demolished industrial laundry building in Islington in 2010. While it is a shame the character on the corner is not intact, that’s life, to see Mode2 put up TCA in the Carnival girl’s tail feathers feels pretty special. Writing alongside is another London graff legend Teach DDS, hence the DDS in the feathers.
Also putting in a major shift was Shine.
RIP pieces were a recurring theme, names of the fallen are still honoured within the community.
The last photo in that set features Vade’s ubiquitous throw which was everywhere but there were also some Vade pieces.
Grenfell fire disaster was over 5 years ago but the horror has not been forgotten and the campaign for justice still fuels graffiti in the area.
Artik is a roller king, at Carnival there was a rare sighting of a spraypainted Artik piece.
Riotous colour really turned up in party mood in these gorgeous creations by Kiwie and Finito.
Quite a lot of graf from prior years makes an appearance, those frugal shopkeepers hoard the hoardings but usually can’t be bothered to do the jigsaw puzzle, which makes for quite brilliant collaged mosaics.
Last Thursday I cycled past the Global Street Art team painting an advert on a wall in Notting Hill, I hope their terms and condition on this one ensure they get paid regardless of any tags, cos there was no chance a Cillian Murphy advert would survive the weekend!
Carnival is about participation, music, dancing, food and partying in whatever combination you fancy, even early doors all that was well underway.
Apologies to creators whose graffiti features in the photos but has not been attributed. This is most likely ignorance on my part, perhaps some omission in there as well, send an email if you want crediting.
All photos: Dave Stuart
Novelondon
Novelondon street art: Street art from the artist Novelondon has appeared around Shoreditch within the past fortnight and there is nothing we love more than delicious new art from an unfamiliar artist.
Novelondon’s new street art combines characters and text with the unmistakable influence of Spain’s Miro. The Rolling Stones and The Beatles lyrics feature.
There is great consideration given to placement, colour coordination with the background looks superb.
A particular favourite seems to tip its hat to Rothko with its placement over graffiti removal colour washes.
Links:
Novelondon instagram
all photos: Dave Stuart