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.
This is a really terrible picture of a quickie from Decay on the left and trademark ‘SEISMIC’ from Jee See on the right. It is always geat to see work from both of these two artists, whose work is stylistically quite different. I am really enjoying these small character type pieced from Decay at the moment.
Decay, The Bearpit, Bristol, April 2018
This board in The Bearpit has since been prepped and replaced with new work sprayed during a paint jam on 14 April 2018 – more on this to follow.
Moon Street remains one of my favourite street art/graffiti hunting grounds, because it still has that ‘illegal’ wall feel about it. I find the ‘legal wall’ concept a difficult one to get my head round. This is a nice straight forward piece by Smak, certainly nothing fancy like he is capable of, but nonetheless it is clean and tidy.
Smak, Moon Street, Bristol, March 2018
When I spoke with him a little while back he told me that he likes to find different walls in new places. I’m not sure this qualifies in that category, but I am pleased he still chooses to return to walls he has sprayed before.
About 18 months ago I was on a secondment with my work, and spent two days a week in Westminster. This gave me the opportunity to reacquaint myself with parts of London as a visitor, rather than as a Londoner, which I am originally, having been brought up in North London. I left in my twenties, lived in different parts of the country and abroad and have been settled in Bristol now for about 26 years or so.
The great thing about seeing things through a visitor’s eyes is that nothing is ignored or taken for granted, every small detail examined and logged. It is so easy to miss that with which you are most familiar.
So…to the door. This door is in the wall surrounding Westminster Abbey garden, a door which most people simply walk past. For me it is not the wood or hinges, or even the sombre utilitarian sign that holds the interest, but it is the surrounding doorway, the mix of stonework and the way it is keyed into the wall itself that I am attracted to. Of course, there is also the mystery…What lies beyond? Who goes there? How can you get in?
You can’t turn your back for one minute in Stokes Croft. If you do, you run the risk of missing out on a clean piece of artwork. This wonderful surreal piece by Tom Miller had only been up a day or two before being tagged over. I find it strange that the perpetraters respected the work enough to tag the black surround, but left the central part largely untouched. Either respect the piece or don’t, but this faux politeness is a joke.
Tom Miller, Stokes Croft, Bristol, March 2018
Once again Tom Miller challenges our conventional world with a burst of colour and a figure whose head appears to be exploding off its body. I think that Miller has an unbelievable talent and extraordinary imagination. Best of all, I like it that he uses the streets as a gallery so that Bristol citizens have free access to his talents.
Tom Miller, Stokes Croft, Bristol, March 2018
Although his subject matter might not be to everyone’s taste, it is clear that we are witnessing the emergence and development of a very special talent.
Shutter pieces are always difficult to photograph, and I understand they are a devil to paint too. There is always quite a lot of glare from the curves on each panel of the shutter, and they are usually best seen with the naked eye which somehow accommodated for the glare and gives you a better image.
Kin Dose, Stokes Croft, Bristol, March 2018
The chimp here is a beautiful creation by the versatile Kin Dose. He had a piece on this exact same shutter before, but it had recently been vandalised. I am a big fan of his work, and he produces it infrequently enough to always make you want more.
You can see that I am having yet another trawl through my archives, bringing out some real gems that have been left behind. Part of the reason is that due to the Easter break and a bereavement, I haven’t been around to take many pictures and so don’t have too much contemporary Bristol street art to show you.
Jaksta, M32, Bristol, March 2016
This is a wonderful piece by Jaksta, a member of the Read and Weep (RAW) crew (and several other crews too). I seem to remember this piece, at one of the tunnel entrances to the M32 roundabout was there for quite a while.
Jaksta, M32, Bristol, March 2016
At the time I took the picture, I didn’t know who the artist was which is probably why it ended up in my archive in the first place. I think that this is a really masterful piece, splitting the character into two colours is a fairly radical treatment, but somehow when you look at the piece, you barely notice the colour seprartion and see the character as a whole. Beautifully sprayed…big respect to Jaksta.
This is one from the archive that I can release, because I recently posted my first work from Amoe which he sprayed at the M32 roundabout. The reason it took me so long to identify thisartist is that he is only an occasional visitor from Cardiff, and my knowledge of artists is pretty much confined to Bristol.
Amoe, Old Bread Street, Bristol, March 2016
There is something very forgiving about his writing style, the curves create a softness that is very easy on the eye. Some writing can be much more challenging than this. It feels good to liberate this picture after a little over two years. The wall however has not fared so well and there is now only a small stretch of hoarding left at this spot.