6192. Upfest 2024 (37)

There was a time when Lemak, a Bristol-based artist used to paint his stencils reasonably regularly on the streets. These days he concentrates on his studio pieces and electronic art installations and only occasionally paints outdoors, however, an invitation to Upfest is usually enough to winkle him out of his studio work.

This is an utterly outstanding multi-layered stencil of a woman in a space suit, a theme that Lemak has returned to for this piece. To add depth, quite literally, Lemak has added a couple of free standing pillars in front of the piece as bookends to help frame it. Goodness only knows how many hundreds of hours it would take to prepare all the layers for this piece, but the end product is overwhelmingly brilliant. It was noticeable that there weren’t too many stencil artists at this year’s Upfest, perhaps because they tend to work smaller walls, and the focus this year was on large feature walls that suit muralists more. It is so good to see Lemak’s work like this, and I hope that maybe he will treat us to another street piece before too long.