It has been enjoyable to watch as Astrea becomes more bold with her artwork and the spots she is choosing to post. She seems to be settling on a style that is all her own and quite Gothic in its appearance.
Using the colours red, black and white, which contrast superbly (a combination much used by Decay in his early days), she has created an attractive abstract design. Tucked away on the edge of a long hoarding, I would expect this piece to be around for a while. Great progression.
Unfortunately, I don’t get to post every piece by every artist, and even the artists I am more partial to don’t get fully represented here. There is so much artwork out there that only a fraction ever makes it onto these pages. Although I have posted a lot of Desi pieces, the same cannot be said for her partner, Mr Two Gram. Here they combine well on one of my favourite walls.
On the left Desi has painted a combination piece with her VEIL letters and a Chinese lucky waving cat (why are these such a thing? I never saw them when I was a kid). The piece is really nicely finished, and such a marked improvement on her early works, there is so much more sophistication and technique in her work these days.
Mr Two Gram tends to paint pieces that are reasonably consistent from one to the next, perhaps with a colour change or letter change from time to time. He likes to stick with his 2GRAM lettering (or TWOGRAM) often in Chrome, but not always. I would class Mr Two Gram as a graffiti writer’s graffiti writer, if that makes sense – one for the purists. This is a cool collaboration.
It was easy to spot that this bright and colourful piece on a support column under the M32 was by Lis. Less easy was to interpret what is going on here so I turned to Instagram to see how the artist described the piece in her own words. The answer “Bright and tempting tree trunk portal” painted during a Bristol Mural Collective paint jam.
The woodland theme is something that Lis clearly enjoys, along with nature too, and she has painted a couple of hallmark toadstools in the tree trunk. There is a lot of detail in the piece, and I love the depth and perspective on the signpost arrow. some woodland flowers finish the piece off beautifully. It is always a genuine pleasure to hunt down or stumble across artworks by Lis.
I only really became aware of The Art of Sok’s work a couple of years ago or so, and thoroughly enjoy his cartoon style. There is a simplicity to his work, which relies on outstanding design beautifully sharp accurate and sharp execution.
The Art of Sok has painted a face on a wall, without any outlines of a head, as if the wall itself were animate, looking not unlike something you might see in a Thomas the Tank Engine illustration, only better. The colours and shading are near-perfect and design flawless. A great first Bristol piece of the year.
One of the great pleasures over the last eight or so months has been watching the development of Lis (formerly Le Imposter Design), from an occasional line-drawing artist to a full-on and busy spray can street artist. Her transition has been swift, but he has held onto some of her original techniques and augments some of her pieces with pens for the finer detail.
This is an unusual study piece on a column in the M32 Spot. There was a tagger a few years ago who used to paint coffee pots like this all over the city, but this is the first one I have seen since then. The piece has a naive art style about it, and is fun to look at, and I wonder if it had a dual function of being a bit of a practice for borders, lines and shading. So much more to come from an artist who is in overdrive.
I am not entirely sure where Jest Soubriquet is based, but he comes to Bristol to paint often enough to make me think it is probably along the M4 corridor somewhere. This piece is painted on one of my favourite walls in Bristol under the M32 and features a wolf.
While I would say there are one or two things not quite right with the Wolf, I think it is a great representation and the colours and shading augment the animal really well. I am interested in the overall composition, which places the wolf in front of a brown and pink background, which might represent something, but I am not sure what. The words’Beware the dogs of war’ accompany the piece and perhaps put into some kind of context. Always great to find pieces by Jest Soubriquet.
I can’t believe that today is the last day of January… I swear that time is accelerating, or at least that is how it feels (it is my age you know). I recollect that Stivs told me a long time ago that he and Mest had shared a flat for a while, which might account for this coming together to paint this collaborative wall.
Stivs has been smashing it consistently for a long time, and his current penchant for painting characters from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise is a very welcome theme. A fun fact – did you know that ponds and lakes up and down the country (particularly in the south) are populated with terrapins (a non-native species) which were purchased by children and families thanks to the power of the movie franchise, as adorable exotic little pets. Little terrapins grow into big terrapins, and as these creatures outgrew their tanks, people released them into the wild (an illegal act without a licence). Some survived and have adapted to their new environment, and that is why you might spot them if you keep your eyes open.
I have always liked the simplicity of Mest’s writing, and although he doesn’t paint all that often, he manages to retain his style and technique with ease. The letters, in an informal font, are nicely proportioned and filled without being fussy. There is a very nicely done drop shadow, which again is delivered without fuss. What lifts the piece, in my view, is the way the greys work with the background colour and the fabulous interface created with the subtle green border. A fine collaboration.
Logoe has been back in town again, and what I particularly like about this piece is that he has taken the whole long board over. Sometimes this space is occupied by two artists and occasionally by three, but in this instance Logoe has hogged the whole thing, and has certainly eked out his letters to fill the space on the right. I left the chair in front of the piece, because I felt it added a bit of artistic interest.
Script writing is something of a speciality for logoe, and his joined-up letters appear very much as they might on a page. The fill drifts from bright yellow on the left to pale orange on the right, and the whole thing is liberally sprinkled with little oval dots running horizontally just above the midline. Set on a blue background, the whole thing looks lovely.
I am baffled that I have posted fewer than 200 pieces from the M32 Spot – it feels like an awful lot more than that. I am very much an admirer of Creamylines’ work, and simply don’t see enough of it. His original pieces always remind me of stained-glass windows in the use of colour and the segmentation of different elements as if separated by leading.
In this column landscape/seascape/riverscape piece, Creamylines offers a bright and optimistic view of people and nature beneath a bright sun and patchy clouds. There is lots of detail, and naturally I am drawn to the fish in the middle section. There is so much to enjoy in this uplifting piece. I definitely would like to see much more from Creamylines.
I first saw this portrait piece from a distance, and couldn’t for life of me think who the artist was and it was only when I got close enough to take some pictures that I could see it was by Bogat, of course. There is a little clue in the central panel of the baseball cap.
This is an archetypal cartoon character piece the likes of which you might see anywhere in the UK, what is a little different from Bogat in this one is the speech bubble with the rather unsavoury words “Ya mum smells like prawn cocktail”. And there we have it… subversion, art, expression, talent and fun all plastered up on a small column under the M32. It is what it is all about.
Natural adventures 