Monumental Paintings
Farscy recently posted some excellent photos of a mural project he knew about. And I figured turnabout was fair play, so here are some murals I’ve taken pictures of.
Here are a couple which are actually part of the same mural, but it’s so big that my camera couldn’t go wide enough to capture it all.
In the theme of animals, here’s a house which has a mural of birds on its side. Maybe mockingbirds?
Not sure what this is about…
And finally there are portraits.
i really like that black and white portrait
does kind of annoy me when people tag over murals tho…..like…you had all the boring walls to choose from..and you went with that one?
…years back…after he made a bunch of cash but before he started building mock fun-fairs or underwriting migrant boats…banksy bought a passageway that’s basically a run of railway arches behind waterloo station in london…it’s called leake street if anyone’s interested…& if I could find them I had a bunch of pics from the weekend it opened…when he & a bunch of talented types had covered the joint in some really impressive stuff
…it was never intended to be a permanent display…there was literally a billboard telling people to fill their boots…possibly with the strapline “gentrify this” iirc…but all the same I recall being kind of gutted to come back less than a week later & find more than half of it either tagged over or blocked out by what were clearly low-effort stencil jobs…I dunno…the people I knew way back when who knew their way around a spray can were pretty strict about only painting over something if you thought you could do better…& if the general feeling was you hadn’t it didn’t go great for you…but apparently that isn’t really a thing these days?
…either way the one that really seemed like the cheapest shittiest shot covered this one section that I’m still sort of amazed by even just thinking back to it…wasn’t even really a painting…the guy had chipped back the plaster down to bare brick in places & made these giant bas-relief portraits that were just amazing…& some tossers had tagged it within days before someone tried painting over it as though it was a flat surface with something that would have looked pretty lame even if it had in fact been on a flat surface…but looked ridiculous because it wasn’t…why the idiot with the stencil picked that as the spot to cover up I will never understand?
…probably worth mentioning I’m not equating using stencils with being crap…pretty sure your man banksy uses the things & he’s anything but…in any case it was bugging me so I think I tracked down a pick of the ones I was thinking of
https://vhils.com/map/cans-festival/
…& banksy’s effort for that opening weekend
https://www.leakestreetarches.london/post/div-class-header-h5-a-brief-intro-to-the-cans-festival–h5
One of things about tagging that bugs me is when it’s a way for well off suburban kids to mark up urban areas. There’s a subset of taggers who are the stereotypical unimaginative wannabe edgy art students who are basically expressing pent up superiority complexes toward urban landscapes they’d never even begin to carry out in their homes.
Obviously there are all kinds of taggers and many are working their home turf, but the whole idea of going into only certain areas because the standards are lower there is a pretty crummy kind of petty imperialism.
Those birds are beautiful!
We have a local muralist here by the name of Wylie Caudill. I love his work.