College student Derek Dipietro fell for some stencils by French Street Artist C215 on his recent trip to Amsterdam. The stenciled images are most likely of people who live in the area, as C215 likes to photograph neighborhoods’ residents, frequently the marginalized among them. The artist considers his stencils to be a gift to the community, and a way for a locality to retain its individual character. Dipietro was so impressed by what he found that he began to play with and alter his photos using image software called Aperture, and in the process began to create new interpretations.
From working with C215 to create his most recent monograph, we know that the artist encourages photographers to interpret his work in any way they wish, so he no doubt would be pleased to see this youth from North Carolina State University learning how to tweak photos of his work. Since we like to celebrate the creative spirit, we’re excited anytime somebody wants to share his or her creations too.
It’s also part of technological and cultural literacy for us all to understand the new tools that are employed to alter imagery throughout the world today, and to appreciate and respect the power that we all wield with creative mouse clicking. Similarly, we have to consider our responsibility to attribute authorship and how to protect it, and when. In the wrong hands, an artist’s work can be abused or appropriated for profit, which is where the grey areas get defined.
Keep up your studies Derek and thanks for sharing your work and your interpretations of the work of C215.
The Mineapolis Twins (Broken Crow) and Overunder have once again combined their talents for this video – just released minutes ago. Part of the New Guard of storytellers, we’re very excited to see what they’ll be coming up with for “Street Art Saved My Life” this summer.
Veng and Chris of RWK Plus Overunder, Never, Peeta and ECB Finish a Wall in Bushwick
Sometime in April we brought you a wall in progress with the tireless Veng and Chris of RWK in collaboration with Overunder, Never, Peeta and ECB for good measure. The guys finished their work a while ago and finally last week we had time to go and check it out. Not surprisingly, each member continues to tighten their individual visions and the wall is richly painted with beautiful details, vivid imagination and a mastery of the can.
The walls of Robots Will Kill and friends can sometimes resemble an open sketchbook of imagination, predilection and pursuit; with Western and urban styles that coexist and interact, if not merge. A 90s 3-D wild style meets 2-D cartoon while a molten white man’s dinosaur heads floats nearby ominously. An ever evolving collective of painters, these friends have worked together often, watching their individual interests and styles develop and articulate.
In this fresh spring collection, the new element of an absurdist nature comes from the mind of Overunder, who sweeps up Veng’s 15th century oil portraits with the roll down gates of city bodegas, depositing them in a ramshackle pile of human limbs and signage like a receding tornado. Another subtle humorist, Overunder gives his gates appropriate adornment; graffiti throwups, tags, a robot from Chris RWK and the time honored graff dis – “Toy” sprayed across a Nike logo.
Somehow Veng’s formalist portrait retains its character and remains drolly poker-faced and disinterested among the debris, and Chris RWK’s robot rises above quizzically in a Shakespearian robe from the Costume Department. The crowning achievement is the deli-canopied cladding Veng’s character head gets – a surreal Star Wars / Escape From New York helmet that flies him here from a Van Ecykian past.
You ever notice how train lines look like veins on the subway map?
A couple of weeks ago we featured the work of street artist Beast on benches at bus stops in Los Angeles where he caught our beloved super heroes standing in the unemployment line.
This weekend he played with the NYC subway map and put it out for public inspection with a project titled “Unexpected Improvements”. Getting this outcome is not as hard as it looks, rather it’s the angle. Beast simply rotated the typical subway map 90 degrees. Tourists gladly pointed to it’s features while some quizzical old timers took a little while more to gander at it, wondering what seemed different about the new map.
Luckily we have photos to show you because almost all of them are down now. Guess even the Beast can’t keep it up forever.
Our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Enzo and Nio, El Mac, Hargo, L.E.T., Paul Richard, Poster Boy, QRST, Retna, Skewville, Nice-One and Sweet Toof.
With photography by Carlos Gonzalez, Geoff Hargadon, and Jaime Rojo.
Well folks it’s the End of the World, as we know it. How’re you feeling? Actually, according to a certain sect of clairvoyant Christians today is Judgement Day, and the end of the world is not until October, so you should still forget about that Christmas Layaway Plan you have at Walmart.
New York subways and buses have been pummeled for weeks with pulp novel style posters impugning the good name of the Devil and overweight puff pastry people from the Midwest have been milling around Times Square in sensible shoes telling us that repenting from our sins is pretty much going to be the only way out of the Late Great Planet Earth. As usual, these wild eyed tourists never make it out to Brooklyn, so our borough is going now to Hell – which will be big news to the Hasidic population.
For those of you unwashed who are still here after the 6 o’clock earthquakes roll through each time zone across God damned America we bring you the gloriously sanctified beauty of “Twin”, the new HUSH show at that den of iniquity called New Image Gallery in God forsaken West Hollywood.
“Tagging, Graf, Street Art and art; each is always a choice, an action,” HUSH told us a couple of years ago when discussing his work, and his open approach to borrowing from comic books, graffiti, and traditional Japanese iconography is what makes his work modern.
Internalizing and interpreting the energy from Krazy LA has been a dream for a free expressionist like HUSH, who likes to throw everything at the wall – tagging, painting, collage, – deconstructing and reconstructing until it achieves balance. “I’m big on progression and I’m always looking at how to take my work forward, pushing it while still retaining pointers back to previous works,” says the artist. With a number of shows and countries and street pieces under his belt, the British native is also quietly achieving a mastery of his technique, as urban turns urbane in the finely sprayed misty glow surrounding these peaceful idyllic visages, rising from the blue cacophony.
Marsea Goldberg, a wild and fine former Brooklyn gal, has been looking out for and championing the new talent on the graffiti/Street Art/fine art scene at New Image since the mid nineties, including artists like Bäst, Cleon Peterson, Clare Rojas, Date Farmers, Ed Templeton, JoJackson, Neck Face, Os Gemeos, and Retna, so she knows what she is looking for and knows how to create a charged environment for artists to stretch in.
“Hush is a fantastic artist and he has a down to earth, hard working vibrant spirit,” Marsea explains, “I’ve liked his work for a long time – The first time I saw his work was at the “Cans Festival” which Banksy put on in London 4 years ago. When I saw his colorful, ornate murals in the long tunnel I was beyond impressed. The interesting thing about Hush’s art is the combination of influences.”
For his part, HUSH is taking the opportunity seriously, “It’s great to be at New Image because of its history… I’ve always admired the rawness and energy of the place and Marsea’s commitment to whatever this art movement is.”
As his work mutates and configures across mediums, one might wonder how much of this has meaning to him and whether it is an involuntary stream of favorite symbols and techniques combined and recombined. “I feel like my works have matured and I’m creating my own visual language, even though it’s probably only me who understands it,” he says smiling.
“It’s funny – I’ve had this work in my head for the last few years but it’s just fitting into the story now. I think I’ve got until the year 2014 in paintings now but I’ll have to take you through it in real time… I’m looking forward to showing how it all pans out in the future though.” We would love to stick around here on Earth to see how his work turns out in ’14, but there is someone knocking on the door…
Photographer Todd Mazer captured the artist working outside this week on the “Barracuda” wall where Saber and Shepard Fairey did their near iconic flag interpretations. And through Todd’s lense we get to see Hush tagging the gallery walls and the installation underway.
1. Learn How to Count to 20
2. HUSH new show “Twin” Saturday at New Image Art Gallery in West Hollywood, CA.
3. Oh, Word? Word To Mother at FAME 2010 (Video)
4. BOXI, Dust the Furniture, Draw the Curtains (VIDEO)
5. APEX Rocking Jeans at White Walls Tonight
6. Supakitch y Koralie in Mexico City (VIDEO)
7.M-City in Warsaw, Poland (VIDEO)
Today is May 20th! Can you count to 20?
Shout out to all the kids who grew up with Sesame Street and learned some serious counting skillzzzzzz. Happy Friday.
HUSH new show “Twin” Saturday at New Image Art Gallery in West Hollywood, CA.
Quietly exuberant Hush opens a brand new collection of his pieces at New Image tomorrow night, and he’s been spraying the bejezus out of the walls of the gallery before hanging the new pieces.
Gallery owner Marsea Goldberg, brings Hush to her space after a number of years of watching his work evolve. “The interesting thing about Hush’s art is the combination of influences. His artwork posses a distinct link to traditional figurative painting specific to the UK while also possessing an elegant combination of the abstract and decorative,” she says.
Filmaciones de la Ciudad presents these two Street Artists while they were in Mexico City recently.
“Over 6 days of intense work, the couple made a huge piece on wood, using different techniques such as spray, airbrush, paintbrush, marker, crayon,wallpaper and stencil, also painting their trademark characters who in this occasion, were influenced by Mexican culture, SupalCapone of Supakitch is a mexican revolutionary and Koralie´s Geishka is using a luchador mask. People where invited to enjoy this for free and meet the artists. In addition, the artists got to know part of the city and the lives of those who live in it.
Italian Street Artist Göla is in Curitiba, Brazil working with Brazillian Paulo Auma as part of a public art / street art exhibition called “Hibrido”, or Hybrid. Engaging the children, adults, and walls with fantastic and glaring color drenched combinations of genetically modified animals, insects, food, and technological wonders is meant to be more than entertaining eye candy – while it clearly succeeds in doing that. As the French Street Artist Ludo does with his animal/techno fantasy combinations, this four month exhibit is an explicit call for us to think about the goals and results of our experimentation with the natural world, our ethics, and our blind obeyance to scientific endeavors for their own sake.
“I try to ask about the relationship between man and all other living beings,”says Göla about the influences in his work. With his painting and subject matter a meditation on the laws of nature, he warns of the dangers of messing with it. Fascinated with the hybrids that are coming about, his depictions profess affinity for the natural world.
As he name checks futurist artists like Eduardo Kac and Alexis Rockman , Göla explains “My work is influenced by an ever-present closeness with the animal sphere,” as your thoughts wander to discussions of trans-human futurism, fluorescent fish, all terrain dog-robots delivering bombs, and flying nano bugs watching you through the window while you drool over a Lady Gaga video.
Heady stuff for Street Art you say? Not really when you consider that today’s generation of Street Artists is coming from a huge variety of backgrounds with a flood of abilities, carrying with it bags of tricks only imagined in the aerosol infused reveries of yesterdecade. Göla, for all of this heavy thinking, is a jubilant ombudsman of a hopeful future, bringing an extremely playful and childlike wonder to his work, making it all so much more engaging.
While in Brazil, Göla took time to explore the country and to get up in various towns big and small. Here is the product of his work and collaborations with some local artists.
It happens on a roof in LA, in a back alley. El Mac and Augustine Kofie, two gifted graff writers, street artists, fine artists, balanced assuredly on ledges and ladders, cans in hand and collaborating on a new piece. It’s a dreamlike sequence of scaling and balancing, backing away and re-approaching, scanning the sky as day folds into night and looking back at the bricked canvas to see a gentle babe gazing upward from an abstract future past.
Photographer and videographer Todd Mazer, a regular contributor to BSA, circled and treaded nimbly and quietly in panther-like pursuit of the right screen capture while the artists worked. Over time, perched camera in hand, he documents the dexterous and purposeful movement and focus of two big cats on the top of their game. And roof.
“For me I feel like that’s as good as it gets,” says Mazer.
Using sparklers and an open shutter, artist Gary Stubelick creates glowing panegyrics to light up the urban night. The Boston based creative director has been exploring the fine art of time and light for a few decades and creates incandescent odes to hot summer nights in the city with his interpretation of mundane features of the urban landscape.
A time lapse photographer since 1973, the artist “paints” objects discarded, overlooked and discovered with sparklers, incandescent tungsten, and highway flares, giving them shooting star status, if just temporarily. This public art art is less than ephemeral – it only existed briefly and linearly, with it’s layers collected here and displayed as one perfect moment.
“The idea behind the shot was to combine the renegade nature of graffiti with the explosive energy of pyro. I utilized ballistic sparklers to achieve the splattered paint effect. The bike is a Schwinn Frontier mountain bike which accounts for the title, ” says Stubelick.
Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Derek’s orginal photo of some stencils by Street Artist C215. Below are two re-interpretations of the boy stencil he made using Aperture. (photo © Derek Dipietro)
