D*Face and Smirnoff have teamed up to create an inventive limited edition collectable bottle. To celebrate the exciting collaboration, D*Face and Smirnoff will be hosting an exclusive party encompassing a surreal art experiment in East London on Wednesday 13th June where attendees will each receive a piece of art by D*face.
Vandalog is able to offer one lucky winner a pair of VIP tickets to invite-only party.
To enter, just leave a comment with the name of the gallery that D*Face owns. Make sure to leave your real email in the comment, so that we can be in touch. Only Vandalog will be able to see your email. The winner will be selected among those who answer correctly and notified via email on Wednesday morning.
Adam Cost KRT and Set KRT did these pieces recently in Brooklyn. They’ve put in the hours and the years, so there’s nothing wrong with going the legal route now that people want to see your name on their property. The Cost posters are the same design that he used last year when he was commissioned to be on the cover of ShowPaper. Very cool.
As someone who looks at street art every day, usually online through photos where I’m told or I already know pretty much exactly what I’m looking at as soon as I see it, it’s not often that I still get to experience the joy of randomly coming across street art that truly surprises me and shakes me out of my dreary existence. But someone in New York is doing that for me lately. When I was last in NYC, I couldn’t help but come across the drippy splotches of spraypaint that have begun popping up all over the city. When my friend Rhiannon pointed them out to me, she called them jellyfish. And that seems about right. So, who is Jellyfish? Nobody I’ve spoken with seems to know. And, like most street art, it’s probably more fun to keep that a mystery. Would these work well on a mural organized by MaNY? Probably not. But they are fantastic as a pseudo-tag and for reactivating boring walls. Who needs style? The Jellyfish boil street art and graffiti down to the core essentials of thrill and activation of spaces.
Update: This post should have been about Snyder’s lack of originality rather than a lack of creativity. As pointed out in the comments, Snyder has been drawing Doodle for many years. While perhaps creative, I still find much of Snyder’s work, particularly this piece, to be unoriginal. Maybe that’s worse.
Fromtime to time, I have posted about Snyder. He seems like an enthusiastic artist, and that’s commendable. He also as a talent for finding good placement for his pieces.
Sure, Snyder’s best work was always a fair amount like something Banksy would or had come up with, but I tried to ignore that and find the positives about Snyder’s work. After all, how many contemporary stencil artists can say that they’ve never been a bit too inspired by Banksy at least once?
And then Snyder introduced a character into his work whom he named Doodle. Okay, the character looks like a stenciled version of Dran’s character whom Dran named Scribble, and they are pretty much the same character. Both are slightly mischievous young artists. Again, this alone was frustrating, but Dran isn’t particularly well-known outside of Europe, so maybe Snyder, who is based in LA, hadn’t heard of him. Maybe it was just a coincidence.
And then I saw the stencil by Snyder at the top of this post, which is actually one of at least two in a series of similar pieces. Again, I was reminded of Banksy and of Dran, even a specific piece by Banksy (the maid, shown above). But now another artist came to mind too: Saber. Revealing tags beneath the buff is pretty much exactly like Saber’s Ripped Tag series of canvases. Saber’s canvases are significantly better executed than Synder’s work, but the similarities are clear.
At first, I saw Snyder’s clear Banksy influence and I thought that it was a phase. I thought that he would eventually grow out of it and get his own style. Influences are one thing, but Snyder goes beyond that. As time has gone on, it is clear that Snyder has not only failed to develop a personal style, but he has perhaps even increased his reliance on the ideas of other artists.
This buff/zipper piece goes too far. It’s actually not a bad idea. But it is quite transparently 3 other artists’ ideas mashed into one with little original content added by Snyder.
As flattering as it may seem for artists’ to be inspired others’ work, at the heart of this issue is pretty simple: if you are going to take inspiration from others’ work or blatantly rip their ideas, then do it better and make it your own. Snyder has clearly done neither and that in itself is disappointing at best.
Franco Fasoli aka Jaz has his first European solo show on right now at RAS Gallery in Barcelona. It looks absolutely stunning. I was fortunate enough to see one of the canvases from this show while it was being finished recently in Baltimore, but I’m extremely jealous of anyone who is lucky enough to see this full show in person. SUBEN, who produced the show, have more info about it as well as available works on their website.
Here are just a few of my favorite pieces from this show:
I Wish I Said Hello is a project that plays with the missed connections section of Craigslist and turns those missed connections into stickers that are then put up in the spot where the missed connection happened. Lisa Park and Adria Navarro have started the program in New York City, but they hope that others will pick up the idea and place the stickers around the world. Very sweet idea. Here are a few of the first I Wish I Said Hello stickers.
As Caroline mentioned earlier this month, the group Young New York is having a charity art auction this Tuesday at White Box Gallery in New York to raise money for their restorative justice art workshops with teenagers who have been put into the adult court system in New York.
Here are just a few of the dozens of artists with work in the auction: Steve Powers, NohjColey, Joe Iurato, Cake, Overunder, Gaia, Rudie Diaz, LNY, Blackmath, Mare139, Doodles, ND’A, Radical!, C215, Clown Soldier, Jill Cohen, Labrona and Luna Park. And here are a few of pieces that will be on offer:
While Caroline and I visited Baltimore with the goal of seeing Open Walls Baltimore, but we also got a bit of a taste for the larger street art and graffiti scene there, including a lot of work that has been done without permission. We even went out with a few local writers (Avoid, Fisho and Mountain) to watch them paint. Here are some of my favorite pieces that we came across in Baltimore that are not murals, including a few of photos have been posted on Vandalog previously.
One of the most under-appreciated but active street art and graffiti scenes in the USA must be in Oakland, California. Luckily, the site Endless Canvas does great job of posting some of the highlights of what’s going on. Here are a few of my favorite pieces that were just photographed in the last two months…
This is the first post in a two-part series based on the visit to Baltimore that Caroline Caldwell and I made last week. We made the trip to see Open Walls Baltimore, but ended up getting a taste of the larger street art and graffiti scenes in Baltimore too. This post is about the work we saw at Open Walls Baltimore. Thanks so much to Gaia, Killian, Martha Cooper, Nanook and AVOID for showing us around the city.
As previouslycovered, Open Walls Baltimore is Gaia‘s stab a street art/mural art festival. Taking inspirations from festivals like Wynwood Walls and Living Walls, Open Walls Baltimore has been bringing some of the world’s most talented street artists to Baltimore to paint murals. With the help of friends like Martha Cooper and Nanook, Gaia has managed to pull of quite a festival. This video gives a pretty good idea of what’s been going on from Freddy Sam’s perspective:
Like so many mural festivals, Open Walls Baltimore manages to do a lot with a small budget (at least compared to budgets like the budget of the Mural Arts Program). Caroline and I slept in Gaia’s studio next to Ever, which was also being used as Jaz‘ studio so that he could finish the work for his show in Barcelona, the studio for many of Gaia’s friends and the meeting place for most of the Open Walls Baltimore artists. When we arrived in town, Ever was stuck a couple of stories up in the air because his lift had nearly run out of gas. Despite minor snags like that, Open Walls Baltimore’s outward appearance is as a great success. Most, but not all, of the walls look good and have had a positive reception from the community.
Unlike a lot of other mural festivals, Open Walls Baltimore have been pretty honest about the criticism they have received and the double-edged sword that is muralism. This interview with Gaia really highlights just how complicated a mural festival can be for those directly involved and the communities receiving murals.
There are still a few pieces left to be finished, but the festival is winding down. Check out some of what Caroline and I saw on our visit after the jump… Continue reading “A visit in Baltimore: Legal art”