Tag Archives: Skeleton Cardboard

Shoreditch Paste Up Frenzy!

Shoreditch is full of little corners where street art survives and accumulates in layers, like a busy kitchen pinboard. Last week one such canvas near Columbia road was transformed by, in no particular order, Donk, Skeleton Cardboard, Rider and Tommy Fiendish into the beautiful paste up collage you see in the feature image above.

Streetart, Shoreditch, ShoreditchStreetArtTours, LondonStreetArt, LondonArtTours, LondonStreetArtTours, , Streetartist, paste up, Paste ups, portraits, canvas, Donk, Rider, zombiesquegee, Tommy Fiendish, Skeleton Cardboard

L-R Rider, Donk

Skeleton Cardboard

L-R Rider, Tommy Fiendish, Skeleton Cardboard

Whether neglect or tolerance is the reason why the property owner has allowed street art to accumulate, mutate and flourish on this canvas is a matter for another day but it is interesting to look at just a few examples of how the patina of this door’s surface has evolved down the years.

A year Ago in November 2019 the door looked like this:

Feat Anne-laure Maison, Donk, Arrex Skulls, Subdude, Fosh, Citty Kitty, Shuby, Noriaki, Silvio Alino, D7606

Just a week ago a fair portion of the art present in 2019 was showing a steely determination to cling on in spite of tempest and subsequent creatives.

Nov 2020: Feat DaddyStreetFox vs Anne-laure Maison, Donk, Subdude, Fosh, Citty Kitty, Shuby, Noriaki, Silvio Alino, Bento Ghoul, Voxx Romana, Pyramid Oracle, D7606

The Pyramid Oracle paste up still visible in parts in 2019 and 2020 has already lasted since 2015, thanks mainly to its height.

2015: Pyramid Oracle, also feat Sweet Toof, Donk, Voxx Romana, Noriaki, Anna Laurini, Ema, D7606

HIN was busy around Shoreditch 2012 – 2014 and if you looked at the bottom of the door in 2013 you would see a HIN character with an Aida face created from her infamous “East End Still Sucks” response to the Hackney Olympics. That originally started out as a “go vegan” augmentation by HIN of Aida’s screen printed tiger paste up as shown in the following shot, the HIN body was still visible last week!

2013: Sweet Toof, Aida, Kid Acne, Ema, Donk, Angry Face, HIN

Finally, back in 2012 this canvas was one of many to host the Sweet Toof/Paul Insect street group show. This photo also features a framed print by New York street artist Gaia in a walk on part!

2012: Sweet Toof, Paul Insect, Aida, Hin & Aida collab, Kid Acne, Ema; print by Gaia

As always the beauty of the art process here is the absence of the selective and restrictive eye of a curator, an organiser.

A few years ago a permissioned wall on Hanbury Street triggered a similar “longitudinal” review of the changes time wrought on that particular canvas, click here.

Finally, if you have enjoyed this look back through a street art time machine why not put an end to that lockdown stir crazy feeling by joining the author on a tour of Shoreditch’s street art, click here

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.

London, Shoreditch, Street Art, Tour, Jonesy, environmental art, awareness, CO2, methane

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

Skeleton Cardboard: Not In Use

It’s all about the art on the street, that’s Shoreditch Street Art Tours. However, last Saturday the tour chanced upon an un-publicised pop-up one day exhibition by someone who has featured often on the tours and on the Shoreditch Street Art Tours blog – Skeleton Cardboard. So we popped in!

Photo: 71RCS

Inside was a collection of Skeleton Cardboard’s increasingly crazy skeleton characters with their appropriation and mockery of health and safety warnings.

Photo: 71RCS

The thing that was really special was that this to view the exhibition you walked off the street directly into someone’s front room, a private dwelling. One of those gallery experiences where you don’t feel in the least bit intimidated or over-awed at being in front of a display of art. Rather like viewing street art on the street actually.

London, Shoreditch,street art,street artist, gallery, pop up, exhibition, skeleton, skeleton cardboard, canvas, paint, spraypaint, marker

Photo: 71RCS

There are a few photos from Skeleton Cardboard’s show here, with thanks to his and our hosts from 71 Redchurch Street to whom credit is due for these photographs (except featured image at top: NoLionsInEngland). A more detailed review can be seen on the Graffoto blog here.

Street Artist Skeleton Cardboard Brings Day Of The Dead Early

A burst of activity by English street artist Skeleton Cardboard resulted in the discovery of a number of new nuggets by several Shoreditch Street Art Tours over the weekend.

We found the above painted doors yesterday morning on a route which we hadn’t explored since Saturday morning. A pair of skeletons exhort us to abandon various false media, perhaps we have to learn from their example, look where too much TV, too much responding to the junk mail, living on the never never got them!
Skeleton cardboard is not one of those globe trotting street art mega stars who gets high profile permissioned murals where ever he goes round the world, he has been doing small and generally witty pieces on Shoreditch walls and we can see a clear trajectory of improving street art over the past two years or so.

Just a couple of weeks ago Skeleton Cardboard had a solo show in Monty’s Bar on Brick Lane. The walls were peppered with dark, day-of-the-dead skeletal characters who mocked those stern proclamations prohibitions issued by various authority figures or found on product packaging which we are expected to read and heed. “Nothing of value stored in here” or “invalid if opened” takes on a darker meaning when juxtaposed with a grinning skull on a dancing skeleton.

A couple of tour groups over the weekend also found new paste ups of skeletons painted on found vintage magazine paper. The magazine in question was a supplement to Amateur Gardening, a respectable gardening periodical it seems and the content was Percy Thrower’s picture guide, to what isn’t stated but we guess gardens. There is no date on the paper but Percy Thrower passed away in 1988, he bestrode the worlds of TV and horticulture like a garden centre goliath but those were days when a man mimicking various bird calls was prime time TV.

Good street art pops off its background and Skeleton Cardboard has certainly found a couple of gorgeous locations for placing these paste ups.

We have previously found free art by Skeleton Cardboard on the streets, see here

Nathan Bowen and Skeleton Cardboard Street Art collaboration, Shoreditch London

Two things about Shoreditch street art that always interest us, artist collaborations and new work by Nathan Bowen. A couple of days ago, as mist turned to drizzle, the Shoreditch Street Art Tour chanced upon Nathan Bowen furiously scratching on a door with his marker pens working around an existing piece by Skeleton Cardboard. The surface became too wet for the markers to work and Nathan declared “game over”. In between that soft rain and yesterday’s monsoon, Nathan found time to return and complete two stunning works.

Nathan Bowen, Skeleton Cardboard

Working with the boney skeletons of Skeleton Cardboard, Nathan’s trademark scratchy feisty noisy snarling creatures are present as always, the larger skeletons of skeleton Cardboard are surrounded by skeletal faces by Nathan Bowen while is snapping helmeted soldiers appear to be fighting a battle with skeleton. It’s war and death together, see.

Nathan Bowen, Skeleton Cardboard

Street Artists Donk Skeleton Cardboard Riposte to Shoreditch Street Art Buff

Someone, presumably an authority of some sort of a care in the community type of organisation buffed the sometimes controversial Sclater St wall a few weeks ago due to some obscenity or offence. It was one of the poorest buffs ever seen, that old health and safety chestnet “no over head height working without hoists, harness, psychotherapy and feng shui” meaning the wall was left with an irregular grey tide mark at about 6 feet off the ground, above that was the flotsam and jetsam of partially obscured tags and wind blown wilting peels of decaying pasteups.

Shoireditch Street Art paste Up Donk London

Donk and Skeleton Cardboard paste ups respond to buff

One of the pieces gone over was DONK’s supersized “Star Boomboom Sound” ghetto blaster paste up which, admittedly, was dragging out its fin-de-siecle dried leaf crispiness. So Donk has returned with a massive tryptic paste up installation in his characteristic purple hazed hue. Emerging name Skeleton Cardboard is up along side him and the Post box paste added more recently is by D7606.

Curiously, the paste ups are placed on a large base of plywood, perhaps to give it a veneer (boom boom geddit?) of official approval.

Speaking of the life cycle of street art, comparing two of my photos of this new Donk piece taken just 4 days apart, albeit a period which did include “biblical downpour Saturday”, it is apparent that a huge amount of the purple-ness has run. Purple rain?

DOnk Skeleton Cupboard Paste up shoreditch london

Gonna need more purple!

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

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