I’m excited to see that Troy Lovegates aka Other, one of my favorite street artists, just painted this mural in my hometown of Chicago. It was installed as part of the Art In Public Places project with Pawn Works, the Chicago Urban Art Society, and Alderman Danny Solis.
Photos by Nicholas Marzullo
Hendrik ‘ecb’ Beikirch recently opened a show in Cologne, Germany and painted a large mural to accompany the show. Beikirch’s show, Transsib – Greyhound. Paintings from train and bus rides, is on now through May 19th at Ruttkowski:68 in Cologne, but I want to focus on his beautiful new mural.
To learn more about Beikirch and his process for this body of work, check out this video:
Hendrik ‘ecb’ Beikirch, “Greyhound – Transsib”‘, exhibition video (Ruttkowski;68, Cologne/Germany) from Ruttkowski;68 on Vimeo.
Photos by Nils Müller
I missed last week’s link-o-rama because I was in Boston for the Barry McGee show at the ICA Boston. So worth the trip (more on that soon), but for now here’s what I missed:
Photo courtesy of Rowdy
I’m going to be visiting London in a few months, so I thought I’d catch up on who’s been getting up on the street there. I found all of these pieces on Unusualimage’s flickr.
Continue reading “An update from London”
For the past few years stencil artist Vexta has been enjoying what she likes to call her “endless summers.” Being an Aussie, the artist tries to avoid cold weather in any way possible; this year that meant escaping to Kochi, India for the country’s first biennial. Vexta sat down to talk with Vandalog about her experiences painting in a small town in India, being a woman artist, and the public’s reaction to her visually intense imagery.
R: What was it like to paint during India’s first biennale?
V: It was my first time in India so it was a lot of things – fun, challenging, confronting at times, really hot & dirty (I would seriously shower 3 or 4 times a day sometimes), late nights and early mornings, super rewarding, hard work and there were some great parties too. The whole of Fort Kochi was full of incredible artists from India and around the world there to paint, perform and create mostly site-specific artworks. It was pretty great.
R: Especially given that India is not traditionally thought of as a mural hot-spot?
V: Yeah I was surprised to see any other murals at all – I thought I might be the only artist painting on the streets but when I got there, there was already some graphic sprawling works going up and by the time I left other artists had started to get up and travel to Kochi just to get involved. The street art definitely changes the city, in a good way.
R: What was the community’s response to the walls?
V: Generally people were inquisitive, and sometimes a bit confused, I mean it’s a small city in India, some people had never seen or heard of street art before.
I had some really great responses from people on the street – one great response I had was this beautiful and serious 9 year old boy who spent hours watching me paint and asking me super thoughtful questions about painting, street art and the art world and his own artworks. Then he brought his whole family to meet me and see my work and they all came to my exhibition opening. He was easily the youngest person there. It’s moments like that which make me love making public work, there is no way he would have ever stepped into the gallery if we hadn’t met on the street. Other times some men would be confused as to why I was a women, was working on the street painting. A couple of them they told me I should be at home looking after the kitchen or something, that was definitely confronting.
R: Can you talk about the specific site you were given to paint.
V: So when I got there, the gallery space which was showing my painting had arranged a couple of walls for me in Kochi, I then found more myself. It’s always part of the adventure, right? Driving around scouting spots, talking to people, convincing people who’ve never even heard of street art or myself to let me paint a giant painting on their wall!
Mostly I looked for walls that were already beautiful in some sense, peeling paint, old and falling apart, moss and plants growing on them. Kochi has a lot of very old Portuguese architecture which is beautiful with a strong sense of history. I wanted the pieces to form a kind of path through the centre of the old town so you could go from piece to piece and thematically they’d link together, like a story.
R: How does your work interact with the location?
V: My street work is really site specific. I had a bunch of sketches I’d prepared for India but then changed things up when I got there. I felt like it was really important to explore creating work that not only reflected my experience of being a woman but also to create something for the women of Kochi. Obviously there’s a connection between the women and the birds and ideas about freedom.
I also painted a lot of skeleton crows in the pieces. The local Kerala crow is everywhere. For instance the massive painting I made of a girl with neon bird wings who is perched on the wire with bird feet, that wall attracts so many crows at dusk, so when the real birds take off and land. It’s like they are coming out of the work on the wall & wire.
All photos courtesy of Vexta
For two years the wall shown above remained a fixture at 5 Pointz in Long Island City. Few artists see that amount of exposure on the building’s rotating facades. At the time that they were visiting, few walls were adorned with their signature characters, and even fewer pieces could be seen at this scale in New York. The combination of Creepy’s cute winged man combined with the Yok’s pensive owl made for a moving aesthetic combination that moved viewers to visit the work multiple times during its life.
Since this piece came into realization, we have seen the Yok and Sheryo become regular painting partners as well as (semi)regular residents of New York City. It seemed only fitting that the long running Creepy and the Yok wall should come to an end in order to usher in Spring and with it the Yok and Sheryo’s return to New York.
A constant fixture of last year’s warm weather, the return of the Yok and Sheryo signals the shape of things to come: warmer days, and of course more walls. That being said, a downpour postponed finishing the last fourth of the wall for a later day. It seems that the warm weather is just a “Pipe Dream,” like their wall. But it’s technically spring, right?
Photos by Rhiannon Platt and courtesy of The Yok
Ben Eine is a busy man these days with lots of shows, walls, and a move to San Fransisco. Tim Hans met up with Eine in Shoreditch while he was painting for the latest in our continuing series of photo-portraits of artists by Tim Hans.
RJ: How did changing the Pro/Anti walls in Shoreditch to the Extortionist/Protagonist walls come about?
Eine: Basically I have just moved my studio from Hastings, the courier company wouldn’t allow me to ship the spray paint, I had a few thousand cans. so I thought I would use as much of it as I could. LondoNewcastle who own the building with anti anti anti on it had contacted me around the time of Shepard paintings down the road to see if I was up for repainting it. Yes was the answer, I then spoke with Mother who own the propropro wall, they were up for it as well but no one had any budget for paint or anything, wankers. The old paintings had been there for nearly 3 years and were looking shabby, plus I never liked the way antiantianti photographed, the contours of the wall made it look weird, the challenge there was to paint something that photographed better than the old anti.
RJ: Why the move to SF? What’s that been like?
Eine: I fell in love with San Francisco and a lady called Carrie, plus London is easy for me. I wanted to paint somewhere where walls are harder to get and not everyone is on your side. The move has been fucking slow and expensive, my new studio is 4 times as expensive as my old one in Hastings.
RJ: How do you think the recent harsh prison sentences for graffiti in London have affected the work that is going up or not?
Eine: It’s bollocks, Oker had almost stopped, he has kids and a job, nothing violent in what he does, I don’t think he was that much of a menace that he needed to be sent to prison especially for 2 years, we just did an art auction for his wife at pure evil gallery, so at least she doesn’t have to worry about loosing the house while her man is inside. I’m not sure if these crazy jail sentences really stop people from painting trains and bombing. Getting caught is part of being a vandal.
RJ: What’s a dream location for you to paint?
Eine: More cities in America, big walls in New York, SF, LA and some other cities I can’t think of.
RJ: What upcoming projects can we expect to see from you?
Eine: I got a show in Paris, Galerie LE FEUVRE (164, Faubourg St. Honoré 75008 Paris) which closes April 21st. It’s a group show with Sickboy, and Shoe from Amsterdam. Then a solo show with Corey Helford opens June 15th, and then a few big walls around.
Photos by Tim Hans
Wow. I’d love the meet the building owner who asked Ludo to put this massive piece (titled War Bug) on their picturesque building in Lille, France. Fantastic.
Photos by Ludo
It’s content I missed. Check it out.
Photo by OX
