Eclectic city
a mish-mash of new and old
buildings cheek by jowl.
by Scooj
Author: scooj
I am Stephen. I live in Bristol, UK. I decided to shorten my profile...to this: Wildlife, haiku, travel, streetart, psychogeography and my family. Not necessarily in that order.
588. Upfest 2016 (82)
OK, I know, I just posted a piece by Face the Strange, and here we have another one. I have done this deliberately because I think that each of them deserves a post to themself. Occasionally I will combine pieces by the same artist, but mostly I like to concentrate on each work. It just so happens that there are two by FTS in a row.
I love this small paste up. It could have been easily missed, lurking on a doorway behind a tub of recycling. But take a closer look at this TV set and you will see that there is a still from ‘a Clockwork Orange’ and in the spirit of things, FTS has replaced the heads of the characters with oranges wearing bowler hats. Any artistic reference to this great film has to be a good thing. This wheatpaste is witty and fun, and the style of FTS’s work is always slightly unsettling and anarchic. Great work.
587. Upfest 2016 (81)
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?
586. John Street (1)
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.
585. The Bearpit (34)
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.
Waiting Room
Not a book in sight
nor a newspaper; the age
of the phone pulls in.
by Scooj
Day end
Sky blue turns to gold
to orange to red to black
this winter nightfall.
by Scooj
Plane diverted due to fog
An unexpected
visitor literally
descending tonight.
by Scooj
584. Richmond Road (3)
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.
583. M32 Spot (2)
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.
Natural adventures 