Tag Archives: Jonesy

Jonesy Sees No Evil

Earlier this week a lovely couple celebrating surviving to a particular milestone birthday booked a private tour. We met outside their snazzy lunch restaurant and set off on a bespoke route, they had been on the tour “rule of 6” covid bounce back era and we just wanted to explore different territory. Barely had we gone a few yards when my chin dropped as I spied sitting on top of a street pole a new statue by Jonesy.

Jonesy

It had the body of a monkey and a rat like tail and it was definitely was seeing no evil.

Jonesy

This forms a natural partner to a “hear no evil” compadre a couple of hundred yards away on Brick Lane.

Jonesy 2019

It is wonderful when these totally unexpected surprises catch your eye, street art geeking yields these little magical moments even on a tour.

Links:

Jonesy Instagram

All photos: Dave Stuart

The Darling Street Art Buds of May

Shoreditch Street Art Highlights From May 2012

William Shakespeare is rarely the first thing we think of in street art. Shakespeare’s downer on the month of May was its tendency to be a bit windy so with the low temperatures and rain experienced in May 2021 London certainly bore some of the weather characteristics maligned by the bard in the sonnet Shall I compare Thee to A Summers Day.

The weather didn’t deter street artists and with outdoor groups of more than 6 permitted from May 17^th not to mention of course the reopening of some of our favourite watering holes there was a lot of street art activity around Shoreditch. Here are some of the highlights we found on the Shoreditch Street Art Tour:

ALO had a prolific month and the highlight was this quintet of females painted without permission at the major intersection between Old Street, Commercial Street and Shoreditch High Street. See also the featured image at the top of the post.

street artist ALO painting street art in Shoreditch

ALO work in progress

street artist ALO street art female portrait in Shoreditch

ALO, female portraits, May 2021

ALO, Moroccan Lady, May 2021

Pablo Fiasco painted some jaw dropping stencils in May, the complexity and skill of this father of street art defies belief almost. This –on-the-wall guide to selecting caps for spraycans was genius, and the word “was” is used as the piece, as ephemeral as a mayfly, has been written over.

All Caps with MF Doom tribute – Pablo Fiasco

Stencil Street Art by Pablo Fiasco behind the Old Blue Last on the Shoreditch Hoxton Border in London

MF Doom tribute – Pablo Fiasco

One of the great excitements for a street art aficionado in London is to discover a new Jonesy bronze. One of the tour groups early in May shared my joy as I spotted a brand new Jonesy I did not know existed – from the other side of the main road!

SStreet Art Bronze castsing on top of a pole by Jonesy in Shoreditch London

Jonesy bronze

Street Art Bronze casting on top of a pole by Jonesy in Shoreditch London

Jonesy bronze

Shoreditch’s main purveyor of broccoli, Adrian Boswell hit the streets hard with floret of broccoli presented as bite size angel, devil or 24 carot gold broccoli.

Broccoli street art by street artist Adrian Boswell in Shoreditch London

Adrian Boswell Angel, Devil & 24 Carot Gold Broccoli

3km of string was all it took Perspicere to make this beauty which appeared on the old Shoreditch Tube Station which is on Pedley St just off Brick Lane. String street art is comparatively rare and London based artist Perspicere is the master of the genre, in fact quite possibly the only street practitioner – yarn bombing is something different. Sadly this piece didn’t last too long as some thief went to a lot of trouble prizing it off the wall, that’s the temporary nature of street art.

Perspicere

Finally for this May street art flashback, Ed Hicks produced a spraycan art masterpiece on Great Eastern St, inspired by the apocalyptical landscapes of 19^th century painter John Martin. This truly extraordinary painting lasted about 5 weeks.

Ed Hicks

All photos: Dave Stuart

Jonesy Art: Two Heads Better Than One?

In the mind of an obsessive street art spotter things get little more exciting than the chance discovery of new art by Jonesy. Two new pieces have appeared recently which raise the bar for sculptural street art.

Shoreditch, London, street art, tours, Shoreditch street art tours, Jonesy, sculpture, castings, environmentalism, pesticides

Pesticides by Jonesy, Aug 2018

The first features a dragon fly pinned to a three headed character. The second has what appears to be a pair of Titan beetles, the largest insects in the world against a pair of faces.

Beetle detail – Pesticides

Both of the pieces are called Pesticides and both have multiple heads which represent the conflict inherent in our collective agri-industrial choices. Pesticides harm the environment and kill animals, they percolate up the food chain and accumulate in our bodies, yet without them we can’t produce enough food to feed our ballooning population.

Dragon fly detail – Pesticides

Having had the chance to ask Jonesy himself about the meaning of multiple headed creatures within his art it is interesting to revisit some older specimens starting with this classic Tar Sand Nightmare piece, Tar Sand oil production being the incredibly polluting, energy intensive, expensive and land destroying oil production favoured in Alberta, Canada and elsewhere.

Shoreditch, London, street art, tours, Shoreditch street art tours, Jonesy, sculpture, castings, environmentalism, pesticides, Tar Sand Oil

Sand Tar Oil by Jonesy 2012

That piece is phenomenally resilient. It lost its Native American/Aboriginal Canadian headdress, other artists occasionally paste over it yet it survives and recovers, outlasting the temporary indignities foisted upon it.

Sand Tar Oil by Jonesy (photo 2013)

Earlier this year a painting of a double headed creature smothered in toxic air pollution appeared in Shoreditch, the dilemma here being between the damning choice between petrol (CO2 pollution) and diesel (NOx) combustion.

Fossil Fuel CO2 v NOx, Jonesy, 2018

Back in 2014 this Genetically Modified Organism appears to be a kind of mutant Siamese twin.

Shoreditch, London, street art, tours, Shoreditch street art tours, Jonesy, sculpture, castings, environmentalism, GMO, Genetically Modified Organism

GMO by Jonesy, 2014

Links:

Jonesy Facebook

All photos: Dave Stuart

Summer Is Here – Oops Maybe Not

Sitting at my keyboard, fresh in from a perma-drizzle that looks set for the day it is a little difficult to remember that London has had two” Summers” already this year. Twice, barely a fortnight apart, we enjoyed temperatures over 25 degrees and boy did the street artists love that! Lots of new street art has been appearing daily so here is a little update of some of the fresh street art that has caught our eye over the past fortnight. At the top of the page, Shok-1 produced another of his superb X-Ray images.

Ben Wilson aka Chewing Gum Man has been particularly prolific just recently in Shoreditch and he delighted me with the story behind the two characters featured in a new chewing gum pic outside the Bricklayers Arms. Two deliverymen, Lee and Bryan were hefting barrels up from the pub cellar, Ben had a chat with them and concluded, as recorded on the chewing gum, that Lee and Bryan should be paid more!

Shoreditch, London, Street art, Street artist, tour, Ben Wilson, Chewing Gum Man, Jean Peut etre, Jonesy, Howl Owl, Keef, JXC, Travel Mag

Lee and Bryan, Draymen, by Ben Wilson

Ben Wilson explains …

Not far away from that spot is another one of those chewing gum pics where Ben paints the view, no prizes for recognising Rivington Street:

Rivington St Chewing Gum Art by Ben Wilson

Rivington Street

Last week Jean Peut Etre caused much excitement when he was spied by a tour group collaging his pasted images and letterpress prints in several Shoreditch locations seeming always just a few moments ahead of the group.

Jean Peut Etre Collage

One of the greatest pleasures a fan of street art can enjoy is to discover an unexpected piece by a favourite artist and this came to pass the other day. Wandering around Shoreditch on a so-called day off, armed with a proper camera photographing loads of great street art the other day I spotted a fantastic new Jonesy I had not noticed before, an absolutely stunning cast bronze piece. The casting shows what appears to be a vulture nestling in a roundel of blasted twigs, themselves surreally mounted on the leg of a bird.

Jonesy

A subsequent peek on Jonesy’s facebook account revealed that this had actually been in situ since last September, a full 7 months ago. Just goes to show that even when your eye is constantly scanning high and low for new visual disruptions it is always possible to overlook the beauty hiding in plain sight on the streets. This next bronze casting, believed to be more recent was something I was specifically hunting for.

Jonesy

Howl Owl is a regular visitor to these shores and the cute little owls are packed with personality and get up to all kinds of mischief. A veritable parliament of owls came to roost in Shoreditch this week and this particular group set up a sub committee with a clowder of Keef’s cats on a stinky sewage pipe, looking like they contemplating setting off in a pea green boat.

Shoreditch, London, Street art, Street artist, tour,Howl Owl, Keef

Howl Owl and Keef collaboration

We mustn’t forget that some street art is done with permission, the weekend before last JXC painted this quality image of Judge Dredd taking out Mickey!

Mickey Mouse justice Judge Dredd style

Finally, it was lovely to receive a link to an article on the Travel Mag online where they select their 7 favourite walking tours in London and kindly featured Shoreditch Street Art Tours, we are honoured and thank them, check out the best in London here.

LINKS

Shok-1 Instagram

Jean Peut-Etre Instagram

Jonesy Facebook

Howl Owl Instagram

Sad Keef Instagram

JXC Instagram

all photos: Dave Stuart

Jonesy On TV

Artist and environmentalist Jonesy features on London Live this coming Wednesday (26th July 2017) at 7pm. Something to look forward to on TV!

Jones; wood, feathers mixed media

Jonesy is an absolute favourite on the Shoreditch Street Art and we have had the pleasure of writing about discovering Jonesy art in the past HERE.

London Live is broadcast on Freeview channel 8, Sky 117 and Virgin channel 159

all photos: Dave Stuart

Bank Holiday Street Art

Some may quibble about this but…..wasn’t the cloud cover lovely on Bank Holiday Monday? Since finishing a tour in snow last Thursday, tours have been run in sunshine and sunshine, frankly, casts a shadow on street art photography, much rather a bright day with a bit of cloud cover.

Temperatures rising (we are forecast to hit 20 by the end of the week) and no rain also help. Not that that really mattered in the case of this find of a lovely clutch of Jonesy paintings, as they were under cover.

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Jonesy – Fossil Fuel Genocide

Jonesy – methane, it’s a pain

We also came across a lovely work-in-progress by Skeleton Cardboard. Although normally one would be inclined to pass by a set piece “mural on a board for an audience” style of painting, we love Skeleton Cardboard’s expressionism and bizarre twisted thoughts so paused to dwell on this latest masterpiece.

London, Shoreditch, Street Art, Tour,Skeleton Cardboard,

Skeleton Cardboard, Box Park

Being a bank holiday for some reason the Seven Stars Car Park was pretty much devoid of cars which meant better views of 616’s multi-layered buttress bombing.

London, Shoreditch, Street Art, Tour, 616

616, feat Vibes RT

And clear shots of this, featuring Artista, artist unknown, Airborne Mark, Voyder/fanakapan collaboration and Vibes

Street Art Goes Over Our Heads

Street art should never go over our heads though great examples of street art are often literally looking down on us. Street art environmentalist and master craftsman Jonesy has been adding a few wonderful bronze castings on top of lampposts around Shoreditch.

Shoreditch, London, tour, walk, Street art, street artist, sculpture, sticker, bronze, casting, Jonesy

Jonesy bronze casting

Shoreditch, London, tour, walk, Street art, street artist, sculpture, sticker, bronze, casting, Jonesy, insect, Issac Cordal

Jonesy bronze casting

The first one I spotted by complete chance a couple of weeks ago caused me to spend some time wander about with my eyes cast upwards looking for more, which revealed other artists working over our heads!

Isaac Cordal

Issac Cordal – no idea how long it has taken me to notice this one

Paul Insect

Paul Insect – also getting up quite high

Finally, an older Jonesy specimen looking wonderful at night:

London, Shoreditch, Brick Lane, Night photography, street art, artists, graffiti

Jonesy – looking more sinister and ferocious than ever

All photos: Dave Stuart aka NoLionsInEngland

Finding Free Art

New art and free art made this day another exciting day for guests of Shoreditch Street Art Tours.

Three guests went home as proud owners of new art by Sean Worrall, left as”Free art” on the streets of Shoreditch. In case you don’t know, some street artists like to leave art which people can find and collect, usually there is a message written on the back inviting the finder to help themselves to the art which is deliberatelyremovable, not permanently attached to the wall.

Sean Worrall has a #365artdrops (opens in a new page) project to leave 365 pieces of Free Art on the street usually painted on materials found on the streets then returned to the streets. Guests have in the past found pieces of Sean’s work as reported HERE .

Shoreditch, London, Street art, found art, free art, Sean Worrall

Sunny likes #365artdrops

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This was day 2 of life on the street for an installation piece by street artist Sell Out. Sell Out’s image, a framed collage, reproduces the cockerel familiar to millions of us from breakfast cornflakes packets. Written in the frame is the repeated refrain “I hate cereal”. Sell Out is referencing the protest last Saturday night against gentrification in the area which resulted in the Cereal Killers café on Brick Lane being defaced with paint. You decide how you interpret Sell Out’s take on that event! Suffice to say, a number of Sell Out’s customary paper butterflies were flying out of the frame of the image, originally blu-tacked (is that a verb?) to the wall but this afternoon lying on the floor (photo below taken yesterday morning) and some guests helped themselves to those butterflies as Sell Out has always intended in the past.

Sell Out

Sell Out’s work has been featured a few times before on our blog here

The new art? An incredibly exciting discovery of new bronze castings by Jonesy!

Shoreditch, London, Street art, Jonesy, sculpture, bronze, casting

Jonesy’s Oroborus

All photos: Nolionsinengland

Top Blog For Street Art and Graffiti in Shoreditch is……..

Judging by the “vote me” messages in my email inbox it must be the time of year when bloggers seek “blogger of the year” titles. Shoreditch Street Art Tours is proud to announce it has been blessed with its first (publishable!) accolade this season, our blog tops ShoreditchInshort’s 5 best blogs they would recommend concerning Shoreditch. Wooo hooooo, we are pleased and honoured, thank you very much Julie, author of that very discerning blog.

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Face the facts! Avem, Mr.Farenheit, Anna Laurini

We like to illustrate our blog posts with relevant and beautiful photographs but a screengrab of our own blog on this occasion would be a bit, well, tcky and redundant. So, as we love Shoreditch’s street art AND a new issue of Very Nearly Almost magazine is launching this week, we thought we would celebrate with some of the photos submitted by NoLionsInEngland to VNA which didn’t make the cut. We won’t be betraying any confidences if we say that for each edition, VNA’s content gurus looks through about 20 or so images we select and generally publishes 4 or 5 in the magazine. This leaves us with a number of photos which then generally don’t see the light of day but are too nice to be totally forgotten. Enjoy these photos, more information about the launch of issue 29 of Very Nearly Almost to follow shortly.

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All photos: NoLionsInEngland