Cumberland Basin – Page 19 – Natural adventures

6183. Cumberland Basin

Jaksta, Cumberland Basin, Bristol, July 2024

We don’t get to see nearly enough of Jaksta’s caricature pieces in Bristol, so this one from a week or two back came as a bit of a welcome surprise. Based in Swindon, Jaksta makes a living from his art commissions, so his street work will be somewhat dictated by how busy he is, and he lives far enough away for his Bristol trips to only be occasional.

This portrait piece is in keeping with a slight shift in his work from caricatures of famous people to interesting and dynamic portrait pieces like this one. The piece is cartoon in style, although I can see a transition, perhaps, away from the humorous to a more serious and photorealistic direction. There is a lot of detail in the piece, which leaps out from the wall as being something rather special. I hope we don’t have to wait too long to see more like this from Jaksta.

6167. Cumberland Basin

Alos, Cumberland Basin, Bristol, June 2024

I don’t think I have posted anything from Alos for rather a long time, so it was nice to encounter this small piece at the end of the long wall at Cumberland Basin. His rather loose anti-style writing appears to have been superimposed on another piece, and it looks like the fills in his letters are from that previous piece.

One could view this technique as lazy, but I prefer to think of it as opportunistic and illustrative of the perennial layering on the walls we know and love. The skill has been in how to make his letters ALOS rise above from the surrounding chaos, and I think he has succeeded.

6158. Cumberland Basin

Abbie Laura Smith, Cumberland Basin, Bristol, May 2024

There are two important elements to a great wheatpaste, which are; the quality of the artwork and the location. Abbie Laura Smith has nailed it on both counts with the Swiss cheese plant cut out portrait pasted onto one of the old bollards alongside the river – an immediate impact piece for those with their eyes open.

The black and white portrait drawing, makes great use of two-tone light and dark and is superimposed onto the leaf, before being cut out. It was so much to find this piece and some of the others she has pasted up in the area, and I hope that it encourages her and others to do more of this kind of stuff.

6157. Cumberland Basin

Mr Tanner, Cumberland Basin, Bristol, May 2024

I have mentioned before on Natural Adventures, how much visiting artists contribute to the spectrum of street and graffiti art that we see in the city, constantly adding to the diversity and culture of the scene. All visiting artists are welcome, and none more so than Mr Tanner, whose one-off unique pieces have brought some imagination and and sparkle to this wall in Cumberland Basin on several occasions.

I am not too sure where Mr Tanner is based, but he does appear to visit Bristol occasionally. The horse in this piece is a reverse silhouette on a black background, within which its skeleton appears, almost X-ray-like. There are two vertical lines of writing that accompany the piece, on the left, something in Japanese, and on the right the letters TOPIA constructed out of bones. Altogether this is an unusual and striking piece.

6148. Cumberland Basin

Raid, Cumberland Basin, Bristol, June 2024

Another of Bristol’s writers who creates the foundations upon which the graffiti and street art culture is built is Raid, who, although a relative newcomer to the city, has established himself as a regular contributor of beautifully designed writing, that appears to be on an ever-upwards trajectory.

Raid’s work is straightforward and unpretentious, and often marked out for his wonderfully creative fill patterns. In this piece though he has gone for a straightforward solid chrome fill, with a yellow accent running through the midline of the letters. The blue drop shadow and black border are nice and tight and the whole thing is as tidy as I would expect from Raid. Great work.

6128. Cumberland Basin

Marckinetic, Cumberland Basin, Bristol, May 2024

Marckinetic has been out a fair bit this year, painting alongside his mate Kid Krishna, and he hasn’t yet appeared to run out of inspiration for his FFS designs – this one being a cracking example. There is a real sense of clarity and purpose in this piece.

You have to have some insider knowledge or a great imagination to know that the letters spell FFS. There is a lovely symmetry and flow in this piece created by the curves of the letters, and the deep black shadow gives the whole thing a monolithic appearance. The fills are very nicely worked and I love the cracks in the blue fills. The piece has been nicely finished and is clean and crisp – an excellent and unusual piece of graffiti writing from Marckinetic.

6124. Cumberland Basin

Abbie Laura Smith has been doing herself proud with a new series of wheatpastes in the Cumberland Basin area. I have picked up a few, but still have some others to find. Unfortunately, this one has already been dogged, so I am pleased that I got to see it in pristine condition.

There is a common theme to Abbie Laura Smith’s work, which includes black and white portraits composed in part by lettering and words. The words in this paste-up are as follows (I think):

You will stumble, you may fall

Persevere through it all

And where do I go from here, despair

But you will get there some day

I am not sure whether the words are original or a quote from a song or poem, or whether they are autobiographical, but they carry some emotional power. The piece is one of her larger ones and is truly a beautiful combination of words and illustration. Watch this space for more from Bristol’s best wheatpaster.

6123. Cumberland Basin

Mote and Mr Crawls, Cumberland Basin, Bristol, June 2024

Some more jolly capers from Mr Crawls and Mote, who have been smashing it for months now, and continue to turn out some great and fun character pieces dotted all over the place. This pair of characters were painted on the warehouse wall in Cumberland Basin, and command a majestic view over the river.

To the left is a friendly, toothy monster by Mote whose eyes (in common with the adjacent Mr Crawls character) are simply holes in the head, creating a mask-like effect. There are some nice squiggles and doodles in the fill, something of a trademark of Mote’s work. On the right Mr Crawls has recreated one of his hatted birds, although in a stylised cartoon form that is more angular than some of his earlier work. The pair look magnificent on the white background, and are unusually large, due to the big wall they have chosen to paint.

6117. Cumberland Basin

Solar, Cumberland Basin, Bristol, June 2024

Although I have been featuring Solar on Natural Adventures since 2021, it wasn’t until May this year that I actually got to meet him while he was painting this piece. As with pretty much all the artists I meet he is a really nice person and managed to instantly dispel some of my imagined preconceptions of members of the PLB crew, which were largely based around not having met any of them.

I would categorise Solar’s writing style as soft anti-style, meaning that while he bucks the trend of conventional graffiti writing, there is some order and consistency to his letters, nothing too chaotic or anarchic. The letters are nicely done but the star of the show is the ‘implied’ drop shadow in blue and black, which is a very clever mechanism I haven’t seen deployed before. You’d think that the colour scheme wouldn’t work, and at first that was my impression, but actually it seems to work remarkably well.

6102. Cumberland Basin

Sait Bare, Cumberland Bain, Bristol, May 2024

Rather annoyingly, I keep missing pieces by Sait Bare, either finding them prior to completion or that they have been overpainted, so it was a relief to find this one finished and intact. This letter/character combination piece is painted in a metallic gold colour, that is strong, and the background decor reflects the general messiness of the wall.

The letters spell SAIT with the character taking the pace of the letter ‘i’, and there is a deep red and black striped drop shadow. The character is painted in a carton style, with the eyes and mouth standing out in white against the gold. There is a lot to like about this piece and I look forward to finding more from Sait Bare.

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