Well, here is something a little different from Nightwayss down at the M32 Spot. One of the columns transporting us to a warm skateboarding scene, an appropriate piece for this spot which is a DIY wet-weather skate park.
These columns are such a difficult place to paint a meaningful story, but Nightwayss does it with great skill and assurance, and just for good measure he includes one of his monkeys (as if he wouldn’t). This is a refreshing and wonderful piece from this prolific Bristol artist.
Not long ago, this rather fun collaboration appeared at the farm end of St Werburghs tunnel. It is painted by Daz Cat on the left and CD on the right and while I am familiar with the former, I have never come across CD before this and another collaboration between the two. Perhaps he was just visiting Bristol.
I am used to seeing cats and dogs by Daz Cat, but even though I know he has done giraffes before, this is the first one I have seen and whaty a nice tidy piece it is too. There is an interesting ‘fairy tale’ type character in the centre of the piece nestling in the curled neck of the giraffe. A curious image, but rather compelling.
On the right hand side is a rather tight piece of a grimacing face having a smoke, with excess smoke wafting around the whole wall. The colour pallette is nicely balanced and it is amazing how well light blue and pink work together – I used to have a light blue fleece with pink trim that I bought in Jasper, British Colombia and it was my favourite item of clothing for many years. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something about this work that I really like – maybe it is the rather surreal nature of the piece, I don’t know. A nice introduction to CD’s work.
All artists derive their influences from somewhere. Sometimes these influences are overtly acknowledged and deliberately expressed in their work, and this stencil by JPS is one such example. There is more than a simple nod to Banksy in this piece called ‘balloon girl’.
There used to be a stencil of balloon girl (with red balloons) in Park Row in Bristol, but I don’t think it is there any more. I think, more than any other artist, Jps’ work is often mistaken for the work of Banksy, and it is not hard to see why. Love this piece.
EEEK! What a wonderful anamorphic spider stencil from JPS in Weston-super-Mare. This piece is one of three small stencils adorning a shop front on Meadow Street. The remarkable thing about JPS’ art in WSM is how incredibly fresh most of it looks, and how few of the pieces are tagged.
The patterns on this spider and the shadows it appears to cast on the wall make this, for me, an outstanding stencil. I am guessing that all the little bristles on the legs were painted by hand, as I don’t think that even JPS would have the patience to cut each of those on the stencil. A seriously classy small piece.
I recently took a trip (mainly to give the dog somewhere different to experience) to Weston-super-Mare, and it hadn’t changed much from the last time I visited a couple of years back. What I was able to do however was explore the town for JPS street art, and naturally this is the place to do it.
In my view, JPS doesn’t come to Bristol nearly enough, but WSM is his manor and that is where so much of his work is. I think this piece of a youing skateboarder is reasonably recent, but I have no real way of knowing. I understand that JPS now lives in Bavaria, but I am sure that he returns now and again to his old stomping ground.
This piece, like all of his stencils is beautifully intricate and has been specifically placed to give the impression that the child is skating over the street sign. This is just the first of many posts I will be bringing to Natural Adventures over the coming days/months from WSM featuring JPS, Fawn and PZY.
Way back at Upfest 2016, I bee W was the first street artist at a festival that I had the courage to speak to, shortly before I spoke with Dice 67 (who I later went on to conduct my first, and so far only, interview). Turns out that the vast majority of street artists are lovely people and even at festivals make time for a quick chat.
I bee W is a stencil artist whose stencils are often placed on carefully crafted or textured backgrounds and so become part of something bigger than the stencil alone. There is a story here, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. A lady in a bikini bookended by a pair of seahorses. It is a pretty piece albeit slightly surreal. I have a few more of his pieces lurking in my archives, so I’ll have to dig them out.
That rounds off this series of ten Upfest 2018 catch up posts, but I’ll be doing more over the autumn and winter as there are still so many I haven’t yet posted.
This is a magnificent piece by Deeds, so full of movement. Really stylish and classy. Although I am familiar with the name of the artist, he has been spray painting with stencils since the 1980s, I am not very familiar with his work.
In this piece The stencil of the horse appears to have been done in staggered sections to give it that feeling of movement, and the bright blue strips just seem to emphasise it. In the WIP shot above, you can see that he worked on the piece from the top down on the already prepped red background. A classy piece.
I have already posted a very striking Upfest piece by Brighton-based Mazcan but this one slipped a little under my radar until I recently started sorting through another batch of pieces from last year’s festival.
This is a superb work that looks like it has just dropped off the page of a rather dark comic strip book. There is drama and movement in the way the hair sweeps across the portrait… what is going on here? Her eyes give nothing away. Lovely piece.
It is curious, but in my mind’s eye I thought that I had already posted this piece by Guts, but my foolproof system tells me that I haven’t. So here we have a bright psychadelic piece which would seem to be about consumption. I am definitely a fan of Guts’ work and I think that he comes from the same school of colour use as Loch Ness.
There are plenty of his characteristic motifs, such as the little skulls littering the piece, but a feature I really love, and I know it is not the point of the piece, is the little ‘My Name Is’ sign where he has put his signature. This emblem was adopted by other artists on this set of hoardings at Upfest. Nice one Guts.
Deuz is another artist who was at Upfest 2018 who didn’t appear in the Upfest official programme, which is always a bit troublesome for me because I have to do my own research rather than rely on others. Deuz is a French artist who cut his teeth by writing graffiti on the streets of Marseille in the 1990s. He went on to study art and now his work is largely portraits of Africans, his ‘faces’ that were inspired by hip hop culture.
I don’t know who Nina Gabriel is but then again I can’t know everything. I would hazard a guess that she is probably a musician. The nicely worked greyscale piece was in the back yard of the Steam Crane, which since Upfest 2018 looks like it might have changed hands, and these hoardings have since come down, which is a pity.
Natural adventures 