Welcome!
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring BK Foxx, City Kitty, Dain, Jucer, Nick Walker, Praxis REVOK, Sam Himer, Sheryo, Skount, Smells, The Yok, Turtle Caps, UFO 907, WRDSMTH.
Welcome!
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring BK Foxx, City Kitty, Dain, Jucer, Nick Walker, Praxis REVOK, Sam Himer, Sheryo, Skount, Smells, The Yok, Turtle Caps, UFO 907, WRDSMTH.
Entrepreneur and visionary Peter Ernst Coolen continues afoot with his plans for Amsterdam’s Street Art/Urban Contemporary art museum sometime next year at NDSM Wharf, and a number of artists have been preparing new works for the space and the great occasion.
Today we have a sneak peak at the huge-scale canvas by one of the streets spiritual wizard-like creators, Skount from Spain.
“A few months ago I painted the wall called “Protection, Natural Cohesion and the Soul’s Messengers”, he says of the new mural inspired by the legends of the X ts’unu’um (Hummingbird in Maya) and the relationship of the human with nature and the celestial.
“All the cultures that have existed in our history have bequeathed us their most intimate experience through symbolic language,” he says, spoken like a graffiti fan actually. But for Skount this symbolic language is to assist people to relate to the spiritual world, to synthesize a mystical relationship with life through the symbol, facilitating an encounter between the divine and the human.
“In this mural I have illustrated a hand (as a symbol of blessing and protection) with a drawn circle, holding a human entity, since above all the symbolic cosmos, the circle arises, like the wheel of life that spins the whole nature, with its cycles, its rhythms and its eternal movement. It is, therefore, the totality, the integrity and the realization,” he explains. Only when you see the final photo here can one appreciate the scale of the new indoor work, as well as the size of the future museum here in Amsterdam.
It may look like a gold medallion doorbell, or a fingerprint scanning ID validator, or an icon to poke to open up a celestial app, but Amsterdam Street Artist Skount says it is about accessing cosmic currents of energy.
That may feel a little esoteric for a Thursday, but then you are painting on a roof above Antiek tattoo studios, and it seems like a good time to reflect upon the Tibetan estoteric master Djwhal Khul. This fresh piece is part of a series of murals inspired by the meditations of the Seven cosmic currents of energy, according to the artist.
“This wall depicts the Golden Ray,” he tells us, and explains that it is a good idea to call upon this energy when there “are groups of children that must be calmed down so they can understand more easily the subject that they are studying.”
Thinking of taking this idea to the local public school up the block here in Brooklyn, because these kids are going crazy due to the fact that it is May and they are more interested in the spring breezes blowing past the windows outside than anything the teacher is saying. But Skount says the flame of the Golden Ray can help. “When you need to reach a Spiritual state of mind and feel ready to receive more special instruction, invoke this Flame and Great Instructors and Divine Intelligences will escort you.”
For more about the seven rays/flames, please click HERE.
“Dude how was the weekend?”
“Rad, dude! I partied my face off!”
Skount is probably depicting something slightly more esoteric than that Bro-based expression for drinking large quantities of beer and having awkward conversations with women at a party.
We’ve all been there, don’t judge.
It is notable how a few illustration-based artists on the street have been slicing or dissecting the human form and looking at the insides of us in a diagrammatic or metaphorical way, with the Austrian Nychos coming to mind as the primary experimenter. The Belgian ROA often dissects the animal world to let us see inside as well. In the case of many works by the Amsterdam-based Skount, the figure is more often used to illustrate spiritual matters and metaphysical realms.
“This mural is a surreal representation of the layers generated by the passage of time in our inner selves and that are part of out identity,” he explains of this mural when recently visiting his original hometown Almagro, Spain.
With “Time Layers”, the artist says he is referring to the accumulated information and experiences that we gather along the life path.
“Over the years, we live through different situations, both good and bad,” he says. “We meet different people, we visit different places and we draw on different emotions and feelings generated by everything around us. All of this is saved in our memory and subconscious, stored in layers that shape and draw our inner universe, forming our identity and making us who we are.”
Go to Hell!
Pay your fare!
In Greek mythology there is a ferry man who will take you there in a boat. Skount brings all of this to the beach in Amsterdam in a quick mural he put up last week.
In his capitalist critique, only the rich can afford the ride across the rivers Styx and Acheron into Hades (Hell) in this painting of the Charon (ferryman).
“A coin used to be paid to Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on the mouth of a dead person. The people who could not pay the fee, or those whose bodies were left unburied, has to wander the shores for one hundred of years,” he says.
Bon Voyage!
Introverts of the World Unite!
Brother, its hard out here. Not just the economy and the evaporating social net and the haters.
But for the introverted types, and there are many in society, just having a public face and interacting with lots of people on the street and at your job or in the barber shop is work. You’d really rather be away from all of this socializing.
Today in Amsterdam the artist Skount shows us his concept of that sort of inner life, which he paints hidden under a bridge by himself away from the world. Many graffiti and Street Artists like these quiet places that the infrastructure of our roads and streets and train lines can afford.
“Inspired by the concept of levitation, this mural represents a state of mind, where our hidden feelings and desires from our inner universe provide an upward force that counteracts the weight of the social role established,” he says, depicting a face as a mask that is discarded and lying in a forest of some kind. Perhaps the wearer tired of it, or no longer needed it here alone in the woods with nature, away from social constructions.
Skount tells us that he was thinking of that middle psychological/social/spiritual realm where many people actually live in their day-to-day interactions with the world, a place where we are “keeping our thoughts in a state between what we are (identity) and the patterns of behavior that society imposes on an individual.”
Ah well, there is always another tunnel or abandoned factory to paint…
The combined creative efforts of friends Skount, Kera, and SokarUno on a recent Saturday in Berlin possibly reflect the state of many recently arrived who are living near it. The historic Tempelhof Airport here was closed in 2008 after about 80 years in service and reopened as a recreational park in 2015. Now it is slated to become one of the biggest refugee camps in Europe. Already the former aircraft hangers are occupied by a few thousand refugees, mostly from Syria. By the end of the year the former airport grounds are expected to house nearly 7,000.
Seeing these new El Sol 25 collaged figures and Stephen Powers’ new ironically worded signs posted around the grounds of the Brooklyn Museum may have given us a sense of irrational optimism this week. It also could have been the 75 degree Wednesday afternoon, the birds singing through open apartment windows in the morning or the two-for-one bagels at Hamid’s deli.
Whatever it was, lets keep this springy buzz going a minute. Can we please skip the presidential race for a couple of days please?
Here’s our our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Chagall, City Kitty, Dismist, El Sol 25, Faust, Ivanorama, Jeff Koons, Joseph Meloy, Leaf, Lunge Box, Menace, Mint & Serf, Muse in Me, Nick Walker, Reading Ninja, Reka One, and Skount.
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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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A wild week in world geopolitics, terror, social crisis – interpret them as you may through the prism of art collecting and fandom – as Miami Art Basel and the Wynwood District were bursting with high prices, high emotions, high celebrity-counts, and people who appeared to be high almost all the time. There were also heavy rains, big name music performances, custom designed cocktails, luxury brands, brand fusions, and sponsored walls and events everywhere. Also a stabbing.
Once we can sort through the best photos we’ll definitely share some of the great work with you this week.
Meanwhile, Street Artists continue to create in cities elsewhere and while Miami is celebrating brands, logos and luxury, on the other side of the ocean Brandalism completed a 600 kiosk takeover in Paris this week skewering all of the above and the undue influence corporations are having in writing environmental/trade laws. On the aesthetic tip we’ve recently made a mental note that photo-realism is now reaching a critical mass. So there you are.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring A Pill NYC, Bifido, Buff Monster, Cash4, Dan Witz, Fuzeillear, Invader, Jordan Seiler, Knarf, LikMi, Luca Ladda, Østrem, Otto Schade, Persue, Pøbel, Rahmi Rajah, Sean9Lugo, Sipros, and Skount.
These two pieces are part of the NUART collection of murals painted for previous editions of the festival. They are not freshly painted but we wanted to publish them as they are calling our attention to a topic that is current and urgent and addressed by world leaders in Paris for the COP21 Climate Summit 2015 as well as dozens of Street Artists with the #brandalism campaign.
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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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Periodically it is a worthy practice to consider how many masks one wears, and why.
What are you projecting? What are you concealing? Or are you simply an open book for all to read, no constructed identity whatsoever; just a fresh wholesome apple growing on this tree ready to be picked?
99%ers, Occupiers, and Anonymous activists are wearing Guy Fawkes masks to project a unifying image of breaking a corrupt system and preventing identifying individuals. In their highly produced and staged videos so-called ISIS members are concealing their identities from those who would like to know exactly who they are and who is backing them and to instill the fog of general fear. This years most talked about Halloween mask in New York was the Donald Trump mask, perhaps as a way to express disgust and derision of the person depicted as well as to deliberately evoke our fears that such an aggressive ignoramus might win any election, let alone for, you know, President of the US.
Spanish-now-Amsterdam-based Street Artist and fine artist Skount has been examining masks in his work for a few years from a historical perspective as they relate to social identity as well as in performance, theater, and the sacred. Often we observe that his figures’ faces provide opportunity to travel into space or mystic realm, his costumes rich with folk traditions and magic.
More recently he says that his examination has become more personal, with considerations of Freud’s studies a hundred and twenty years ago into the mechanisms of shielding ourselves psychologically with our constructed masks, deflecting critical analysis of our defects, projecting our virtuous aspects.
In this new collection of works for Skount’s opening of “Projections: Internal latent” in Gold Coast, Australia tonight at the 19 karen Gallery, Skount is inspired by the inner self as it may be expressed via classic theater, cultural ornamentation, and our concept of deity. Using traditional painting he incorporates hand-made glass collage and even LED lights to reflect an inner universe, invariably projected outward – an alchemy of presentation for all to see, and perhaps to hide behind.
Skount Projections – Internal Latent opens today at 19 Karen Contemporary ArtSpace in Gold Coast, Austrailia. Click HERE for more details.
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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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