Tag Archives: Malarky

Diggin In The Archives Part 6

Is there light at the end of the tunnel?  By the time you read this Boris should have made his “statement” to the nation and one suspects the tunnel will seem to be stretching much much longer.  Activities do expand to fit the time available and blowing the dust off the photo archive is a good a rabbit hole as any to fall into, so here is this week’s selection of gems from the past.

You wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a snorkeler (snorkelist?) walking down the road with a lion on their shoulders in 2013, it was Shoreditch after all.   Twisted surrealism from Dal East.

Dal East, 2013

ACE is full OG London, his comic and pop art influenced collage screen prints were pasted up all over Shoreditch from the beginning. They still appear although nothing close to the quantity he used to put out. One of my all time favourite paste up artists. And there’s Skewville , yet again, he keeps popping up in the archive photos. 2011.

ACE, 2011

In 2009 Graffoto founder HowAboutNo and I wandered Shoreditch and beyond on our lunchbreaks, chatting shit and shooting crap. Daytime street art creation was quite rare in those days and one lunch time we spied an artist in act of pasting up some big faces. He scarpered. Brummie Tempo33 told me a while later they had thought we were cops! Not many people wandered round in office garms photographing street art those days.

Tempo33, 2012

As I started to develop a little bit of an interest in street art I had a conceptual difficulty with stickers;,that fact that anyone could have put them up challenged their authenticity.  Then I started to get my head around “Representation”.

It would be very easy to upload a photo of a stunning mural by D*Face, rightly they are appreciated worldwide but his stickers are in my humble opinion are way more significant to his street presence.

Liskbot’s hand finished stickers and paste ups go back a decade, still prolific!

The unknown sticker looks and feels like a corporate logo.

D*Face, Liskbot 2011

East London in 2011 was full of Malarky cartoons. Superficially they had the characteristics of children’s illustrations but close inspection revealed a real darkness.  Often painted with compadres #Billy, Mr Penfold and Sweet Toof.  These old Hanbury Street gates used to host art by great artists such as Donk , Stik, Saki and Bitches and Macay collab, Mau Mau and Alex Face collab and an Otto Schade “Creation Of Adam” masterpiece. And Curly 😉

Malarky, 2011

In the next pair, the elevated elevation behind the grey gantry is the old Shoreditch Tube Station, closed in 2006. The first picture is from October 2011 and features a Rowdy creature and a piece by fellow Burning Candy crewmate Horror. The second picture dates from July 2012.  The difference is the Olympics buff.   One of these pics cost me a gorgeous Colnago Road bike, stolen by some Tower Hamlets low life as I climbed up on the wall to get the pic

Rowdy, Horror 2011

The Olympics Buff, 2012

When its good, Street Art can be very “of the moment”.  The flip side is that years later the context or relevance of a piece of art may be forgotten. This Teddy Baden multi layered stencil features Mandeville, one of two mascots for London’s 2012 Olympics. Mandeville was named after Stoke Mandeville Hospital, the world famous spinal injuries hospital that organised the first games festival for injured people, seen as a precursor to the Paralympics. The orange flash represented a London taxi hire light.   Mandeville was much maligned in the press, there will always be some mirthless killjoy. He didn’t have a good feeling about Teddy’s feline either.

I enjoyed the privilege for many years of submitting a selection of street art photos to the VNA guys for their quarterly zine. The vast majority of them went unpublished, there were far better photos from far better photographers to chose from. This is one of the unchosen. . . .

Teddy Baden, 2012

I took the liberty of visit to Shoreditch on my bike this morning, first time in over 2 months.  Very little had changed, street artists have been socially distancing from the walls.  Notwithstanding whatever guff we get from Boris this evening I suspect there may well be more sucking from cess pit of my street art photos this week, catch them daily on my Instagram or facebook.

Check out the previous weekly compendiums: Part 1, Part 2Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5

Art credits and links are by each photo. All photos: Dave Stuart


Does the Street Art Change Much?

Back in harness after a week away, it was great to find so much fresh new street art appearing on Shoreditch’s walls, here are just a few of the many highlights.

After encouraging the guests on my first tour back to look high and low into the nooks and crannies, one of the guests with a keenly tuned eye spotted this delightful tiger piggy by German artist Love Piepenbrinck.

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Love Piepenbrinck

Sketch is a street artist name I don’t recall having come across before but this new painting that appeared while I was away is quite special.

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Sketch

From someone new to someone incredibly long established, Mysterious Al who was right there at the very start of Shoreditch Street Art in the early 2000s alongside DFace and others has just this weekend done a stunning  high impact mural as part of the Global Walls Project.  The last time we saw Mysterious Al painting on London’s walls was back in October 2012 and after a long period of time abroad it is great to see him back up on the walls of Shoreditch, this guy is part of street art’s fabric.

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Mysterious Al plus others

 Rone hails from Melboune and has done some seriously beautiful street art on London’s walls in the past, we also found a Rone sticker in Reykjavik of all places a few years ago (though obviously we can’t be certain whether he placed it there himself or perhaps a fan did it).  He is back in town working on another stunning female face portrait, in fact in the Mysterious Al photo above you can see another Rone painting from late last year.  This new one is on the wall where the intricate and stunning Octophant by Alexis Diaz had sat in pristine condition for nearly 10 months , the wall was ripe for change!

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Rone in action

Italian artist Nemo spent a couple of days preparing this large mural in Sclater St Car park, there is a very interesting surprise hidden in this piece which with luck will reveal itself over the next few days, weeks or months! More information on that as the surprise is revealed (and I don’t mean just when the cars aren’t in the way!). .

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Nemo

Finally an all star mural, described as a “tutti fruiti” by one of the participants features graffiti legend DRAX WD with contributions from DScreet, BRK, Malarky, Lucas and more.

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Drax, DScreet, BRK, Malarky, Lucas

Yes, there is new exciting street art appearing in Shoreditch every day!

photos: NoLionsInEngland