Monday 17 January 2011

Nick Walker - Going back to what worked

After a solo show in London late last year in which Nick showed off a lot of new work, it seems he's going back to the old TMA style.  This print is rumoured to be released in February to coincide with a NYC show.

What do you think?  Another great Morning After print or just rehashed old idea?

Tuesday 11 January 2011

Sweet Toof and Shan Hur - Having a Dig

Arch 402 launched their first large show in sometime tonight featuring Sweet Toof and Shan Hur with Having a Dig.  Sweet Toof is fairly well known in London for his work around Shoreditch and  with the Burning Candy Crew.  I hadn't heard of Shan Hur before the show but that probably says more about me than it does him.

Roll On 5/5
Sweet Toof's work around me is pretty comical.  It's amusing, but I had never been overly impressed with it walking by.  I wanted to check out the show as he's a local guy and you gotta support that.  I definitely left with a greater appreciation for his work.  I'm a sucker for work done with, or on, unusual materials (or at least not as common as screen printing).

I thought the woodcut prints with the sepia wash were really nice, a different way of printing that a lot of other contemporaries aren't doing much of.  The difference that each one produced was really significant in terms of both the image and the colour.  There were two of these and they were both an edition of 5 with an AP.

I thought the other smaller pieces were great as well.  It was a shame the Dame sold, they were two painting on wood, both APs and both sold before I got there.
Taxi 'toof' grill

The work outside was also brilliant.  The grill on the taxi sitting outside the gallery was a nice touch and the massive mural behind the gallery was impressive.

The bigger pieces lost me a bit, but I always picture art as how it would look hanging on a wall at home, and they were a bit too guady for my taste.  I think the gums work better on a smaller scale.




Roll On Two 1 of 5

Dame - two APs on wood

This was the one screenprint, it was an edition of 10




A horse(?) on the ground filled with sweet toof teeth


The mural behind Arch 402





Hur's colum in the middle of the room, really creative.

One of the smaller canvasses

Roll On 5/5




Friday 7 January 2011

New Paste-Ups and Stencils

Saw these walking back from the pharmacy last night (it's been a long month already).  Love the stencil of the guy with a mohawk.

This is what i mean in my last post about NYC...this was all new stuff up I'd guess in the last few weeks.  Love it.





Wednesday 5 January 2011

New York Street Art - Where are you?

Having lived in London for the past 3.5 years I perhaps have been spoiled by the riches of street art that present themselves around every corner from me.

Want to see a Roa?  That's down the street on Hanbury.  How about a few Invaders?  That's a bit longer, about a 4 minute stroll up brick lane.  Ronzo, D-Face, David Walker, Banksy, they're all in the area.

So it was with much excitment that in my week home for the holidays I spent half a day walking around New York, preparing to be impressed with what was happening in the scene.  I was sure I was going to stumble upon a few Swoons, the odd Shep mural, or at least some great paste-ups from artists I had previously not heard of.

Not really knowing where to go in the city, I consulted a few blogs, did some googling and asked some friends.  I knew most galleries were going to be closed...but this being street art, was not too fussed.

All signs pointed towards the lower east side (my geography of the city not being that great, I was mainly around Spring Street, Bowery, Bleeker and Houston...not sure if that's really the lower east side) so that's where I headed.

So I strolled around the streets for a bit and the first thought was that street art just isn't as prevelant as it is in London.  I kept looking towards the blank walls at the top of building wondering why there wasn't something akin to a burning candy crew image up there.  The walls on street level were painfully bare.  There seemed to be an avalanche of stickers on light posts and traffic signs, but that seemed to be the extent of it.  I got a kick out of seeing a Curtis Kulig tag as well.

I was told Spring St was a place to find great work and what I found left me disappointed.  A few interesting paste-ups, but mostly tags (while they have their place they weren't what I was looking for).

The one piece I really enjoyed was the Kenny Scharf piece at the corner of Houston and Bowery.  According to Vandalog: 

A little over a month ago, Kenny Scharf painted a mural at the Houston and Bowery mural space in NYC. I’m usually pretty indifferent to Scharf’s work, but in this instance, painting that spot was a homecoming. Kenny, LAII, Keith Haring and a few others painted a mural in the same spot back in the early 1980′s. About a week ago, the mural was dissed, as shown in the above photo. I’d say that’s pretty much the reality of painting outdoors. 

When I saw the mural it has been restored and looked really nice.

However, my question is this,where the hell is all the good street art in NYC?  I had a brief time in Brooklyn, not perhaps enough to properly look around, and didn't find anything there.


Curtis Kulig on Spring St

Inside a building off of Spring

A few nice tags here but they were hidden behind a fence. 



Really liked this paste-up.  Looked a bit like Gaia.


The abundance of stickers.  Punk Jews especially caught my attention.

Kenny Scharf Mural