Like Roa, Bastardilla is another artist who has been traveling a bit around Europe this summer participating in street art festivals. A few weeks ago, she was at FAME Festival, and now she’s just finished some walls at BLK River. Here are some of my favorites by this artist from Bogota, Columbia.
And a special thanks to Stickboy, as I think he introduced me to Bastardilla’s art a while back.
Photos by FAME Festival and Scarygami
MOMO has just spent 12 days painting at FAME Festival. During that time, he painted five walls. Here are a few of them.
As FAME’s organizer, Angelo, points out on his blog, MOMO’s abstract designs are very different from the figurative pieces that FAME is known for, but MOMO seemed to work just fine in Grottaglie, even with a slightly different aesthetic.
Photos courtesy of FAME Festival
It’s no secret that RJ and I are big fans of FAME (it’s also where we met, incidentally) and had an awesome time in Grottaglie last September. A few weeks ago, our friend Angelo announced this year’s tentative line up and when I spoke to him the other day, he mentioned that Swoon and Ben Wolf had just been to visit. Unfortunately, there are no photos of Ben Wolf’s work as it was destroyed before it could be documented, but there are some great images of Swoon’s gorgeous pieces, both in the monastery and around town. I really hope they survive over the next five months!
Let me know if you’ll be coming this year – Seth and I will be there for sure.
– Elisa
(Thanks for the images, Angelo.)
Last year, I had the amazing opportunity to visit the FAME Festival in Italy. This year, the festival looks like it will be bigger and better than ever. It opens on September 25th, which is a long way off of course, but they’ve just announced a tentative line up:
An overdue post. Fame Festival opened almost 2 weeks ago now and I haven’t properly covered it. There were a few of us who traveled to see the festival (some from as far away as LA), and if you couldn’t make it for the opening, I have to recommend it for a weekend getaway or something. Everybody had a great time. There was good food, good company and good art.
The gallery component of the festival was nice, but the highlight of Fame isn’t the temporary gallery exhibition but all of the street work. Artists have painted all over the small town of Grottaglie, Italy. Here are some of my pictures:
While it is great to wander around the town and see so much street art almost wherever you look, the highlight of Fame Festival is the monastery. There is an abandoned monastery where I am told the local teenagers usually go to bunk off school, and it has been transformed by artwork. It also happens to be where the Blu/David Ellis film Combo was filmed.
To enter this monastery, you have to go down a road out of town, walk past what I think was a small vineyard, find the wall that surrounds the monastery and follow it until you see some red drips of paint. Then you climb over the wall by standing on a shaky pile of rocks. The other side of the wall looks like a park that has been left to grow for a few decades. There are a few paths where you can see that plenty of people have walked, and you have to find the correct one to follow. Eventually, you realize that you’re on the roof on the monastery and you have to find your way inside. Once you’re finally inside though, it is immediately worth the trouble of finding your way there. I spent maybe 1.5 hours there and still didn’t see all of the artwork. Here are a few of the pieces I did find though:
More photos from Fame in my flickr set
This is sort of like Muto 2.0, but now David Ellis is involved as well. Watch and be amazed by Blu and Ellis’ artwork. It was made inside an abandoned monastery just outside of Grottaglie, Italy during preparations for FAME Festival.
COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) from blu on Vimeo.
I’m so happy to see how far along this guy has come in such a short period of time. He truly is one of the great artists of our generation and I’m so excited to see where he goes next. Just wish I still had those wheatpastes we pinned to the wall of our first art show back in 2006!
Well you can’t say Slinkachu isn’t creative. I really think he’s one of the most interesting street artists out there these days. This piece is one of five he has worked on in the past two days since arriving at FAME Fest.
JR and Sam3 have been working hard in the studio in Grottaglie! JR’s print is based on his piece “Self Portrait in a Woman’s Eye, Kenya” from the Circle Culture show back in June. Sam3’s print is called “Subconscio”. Even though these artists are stylistically very different, the introspective quality of the imagery is quite complementary; I think these prints would look nice on the wall together.
Can’t wait to see what JR does on the streets.
Ericailcane has been working really hard on the streets of Grottaglie this month (see another great wall here). He has also been making lots of great art for the FAME Fest show, such as hand-touched prints, little ceramic monkeys and a big bear sculpture. See more in-progress shots of the latter two below as he finishes things up and heads out of town.
