All posts tagged: S

Born outside Sydney and based in Glasgow, Sam Bates—SMUG—began the way many graffiti writers do: skateboards, hip-hop, and late-night missions to get his name up.

He’s still getting his name up.

That early graffiti period sharpened his sense of scale and texture. Over time, his work stretched beyond letters toward faces and figures—painting freehand—evolving into what some have called a stylized realism. We might say it is stylized realism with a twist, because the people SMUG paints are recognizably themselves and yet just a half-step into a dream—close enough to touch, strange enough to study. His characters, whether a tired worker, a mischievous child, or a curious bird, are rooted in real life and heightened just enough to suggest a larger story and possibly a punchline you hadn’t anticipated.

SMUG’s walls can now be found in cities across Europe and Australia—from the Glasgow City Centre Mural Trail to festival sites in Edinburgh, Melbourne, Kotka, and North Hobart, as well as the rural stretches where grain silos tower like cliffs above their towns. Silos have become something of a specialty, especially in Australia, and his work has joined a growing effort to treat these industrial structures as community landmarks rather than leftovers waiting to decay. Juddy Roller, the Melbourne-based creative studio behind the Silo Art Trail, has been central in connecting SMUG and other artists with local communities and producers, including the new mural here in Kapunda.

Kapunda’s silos stand at the edge of one of Australia’s earliest copper mining settlements, and the story told through paint reflects that history—an 1840s miner at work underground, a scene lit with grit, not nostalgia. It’s a reminder of the physical cost that built the town and, by extension, the country. This miner is not a romantic emblem; he is a working figure whose story has largely gone unpictured. Scale and proximity do the rest: a giant face meets the viewer head-on, turning past industry into a present encounter.

As history often does, it becomes a conversation about now. Many here in Kapunda say the town is changing—creatively, economically—and the silo artwork is one of the most visible signs of that shift. The project grew from a community campaign, and the result feels local in the best way: a monument to people. In SMUG’s hands, realism serves memory and identity—and, as you know, a wall (or a silo) can tell a fuller story than a plaque ever could.

If this is stylized realism with a twist, the twist may be perspective: look up, look closer, and see what a town chooses to show the world on a canvas impossible to ignore.