Face the Strange seemed to have a great time at Upfest 2016, spreading the love all over North Street with a fine selection of his wheatpastes, each one of them curiouas and humorous.
This one seems to show four red-shirted gentlemen with projector or television tubes for heads. Nobody said that peculiar wasn’t allowed at Upfest, so Face the Strange has provided it in bucket-loads. A commentary on techno-geek-physics-heads? Reminds me a little of Kraftwerk, remember them?
Some pieces in Bristol are really hard to photograph and this is one of them. It is a large work by 3Dom sprayed on the side of a business unit in a residential area of St Werburghs. There are always cars and vans parked outside the unit, so the pictures are from rather awkward angles and distances to avoid bonnets, wing mirrors interfering with the shot.
I spotted this some time ago and have tried, unsuccessfully, to get a single clean shot of the whole piece. It is a 3Dom classic. Dreamlike and fantastical. I am not entirely sure what exactly is going on in the picture, but looking at the detail of the piece brings out more than first meets the eye.
For example, the leg is like an X-ray exposing the bones, and the shoes are literally rooted to the ground. The head is like a light attracting moths and insects and the whole figure appears to be paying homage to a little toadstool.
Creative and fun, but utterly unintelligible. I love 3Dom’s work.
Tracking through my archives I found this piece by Decay. I thought that I had posted it, but it seems I had not, so here for the first time I bring you a piece which was sprayed during a bit of a Decay frenzy, shortly after he had arrived in Bristol.
This piece is quite different from most of his other work. The colour regime is typical, but the composition is something else. Usually Decay works with concentric rings of graded shades working out from the centre (although they are sprayed from the outside in – I think) and topped off with a smiley face. None of that here. This is a one-off.
I like this work, even though it reminds me of a duck.
Not a book in sight
nor a newspaper; the age
of the phone pulls in.
by Scooj
Sky blue turns to gold
to orange to red to black
this winter nightfall.
by Scooj
An unexpected
visitor literally
descending tonight.
by Scooj
I was actually looking for something else when I found this goat stencil by Stewy. I have known about it for sometime, but had no idea where it was. Finding it was the reward for my curiosity in seeking out some graffiti nearby.
Stewy has produced some wonderful stencils around the city, including this Robert Wyatt piece posted last year. Animals and well known people are the areas Stewy specialises in and his stencils are distinctive in that they are nearly all two tone.
When I first photographed the goat, the sun played havoc, with half the goat in sun and half in shade. I tried making a shadow with my body, but it looked, frankly, a bit crap, so these pictures are a second attempt ion a flat-light day, and not great pictures either.
Following on directly from the previous post, here is another wonderful piece from the concrete sprawl under the M32. This is by 3Dom from back in September 2016, and you might get a flavour of what he thinks of it from a hashtag he used on his Instagram feed: #skullsareprettyboringafterawhile.
Tucked under the M32 is a well known Bristol wet-weather skate spot which has developed through great DIY work to create ramps, rails, steps etc. A busy place in the Winter. The area lends itself really well to graffiti artists as there is rather a lot of concrete in the form of walls and pillars. This is the first of many posts I will be writing about art in this area.
I remember the day you died
we had been playing all of us
in the garden around the house.
We squeezed in the car for a trip
oh! happy day with my cousins
I remember the day you died
I looked forward to the summers
spending time with your family
you were all like siblings to me
at least, during the holidays
I remember the day you died
we had a tumble, you and I
and our heads banged hard leaving bumps
your head small, you were only two
you shed tears and after we laughed
I remember the day you died
I left you then to stay over
with our grandparents for a while
and that was it
I wouldn’t see you again
That was the day you died
drowned alone in the swimming pool.
The call came through to my grandma
I’d never seen them cry before.
Then the sadness that never left.
I still had the bump on my head
something from you so tangible
I wanted to keep it always
but it went as I knew it would.
Many years have passed little cuz.
I can’t forget the day you died.
by Scooj
For E.K.
Natural adventures 