Street art – Natural adventures

5262. M32 Spot (164)

Kid Krishna, M32 Spot, Bristol, May 2023

I simply can’t keep up with Kid Krishna at the moment, and I think I am going to have to do a ‘sweep up’ post of pieces that I haven’t posted so far this year, because all of them deserve to be featured here on Natural Adventures. Not only is he incredibly prolific, but he manages to spread himself far and wide, although mostly north of the river, to be fair.

There is nobody else like Kid Krishna, both in terms of the person and his art. His lettering, although it is often such a mash-up, spells CRIE, and you can see a little CRIE at the bottom right-hand side of the piece. The letters TPN and NKA also usually make an appearance in his work too. In recent months, the letters have been incorporating fragments of character artwork, and there is a cat incorporated here. The white letters with green and yellow accents and decorations work incredibly well on the black background. This is a magnificent work from Kid Krishna.

5261. M32 Cycle path (218)

Solar, M32 Cycle path, Bristol, May 2023

Some artists manage to keep themselves very much to themselves, and that is true of most of the PLB crew, including Solar. I have been featuring Solar’s work for a few years, but have never met the artist and have never found out anything about them. That is fine and how some like to keep it, as anonymity is an important part of illegal graffiti and street art.

I like to post pieces by Solar because they are very different to most of the stuff you see from day to day, often writing with thick letters in a blocky style but with an organic feel to them. Solar has gone full-solar on this one, with a sizzling sun-drenched background around the strong white letters. Nice work from an artist slightly underrepresented on Natural Adventures.

5260. Upfest 2022 (70)

One of the admirable things that Upfest manages to do is combine the national and international interest from artists around the globe with local artists who paint the streets of Bristol week in and week out. The artists are treated equally (although some get allocated ‘premium’ walls), and there is a fabulous sense of community.

This piece by local artist Maybe (Maybepaints), who only started painting on the streets about 3 or 4 years ago, doesn’t look out of place shoulder to shoulder with established international artists. The piece is, as much contemporary street art tends to be, a commentary on the state of our environment, with supermarket plastic bags drifting in the ocean.

Maybe is a lovely man – much taller than I had expected – who has developed his own techniques, combining freestyle painting with stencils, to create these remarkable ‘other worldly’ places and scenes. You can see his progress over the last few years in this updated gallery of his work.

5259. Upfest 2022 (69)

Foxes have a special place in Bristol. Although urban foxes are found throughout the UK, it was in Bristol where they first were recognised as a ‘thing’ through a research programme conducted by Bristol University. In fact, their research showed that Bristol played host to the most densely populated community of foxes ever recorded, centred around my old allotment. The funny thing is that even though they are so common, there is something quite special about seeing a wild mammal living amongst us.

Justinks, who has painted at Upfest a few times, has absolutely nailed it with this outstanding greyscale rendition of a sleeping fox. It is a truly beautiful painting and captures not only the form of the fox perfectly, but also its peaceful sleeping state. A wonderful piece.

5258. Upfest 2022 (68)

The quality and variety of pieces at last year’s Upfest was as good as it has ever been, if not a little better. My only regret is that I didn’t manage to capture completed pieces by many artists, because there was an abrupt end to the two-day festival, after which the boards in Greville Smyth Park were dismantled, and that was that. Fortunately, just as I was leaving, Ale Poire (from Guadalajara, Mexico) was signing her beautiful hands piece, and the signature usually indicates the piece is complete.

There is something very special and expressive about hands, and Ale Poire has captured a tenderness in this emotional painting. The simplicity of the composition combined with the technical craft of the artist left me with one of the most memorable images of the festival. A very special piece, which would last for only a few hours after I took this picture.

5257. Upfest 2022 (67)

An occasional visitor to Bristol for Upfest, Woskerski is an outstanding artist who operates out of London. I have posted pieces by him a few times in Natural Adventures, but because I don’t visit London much these days, his appearances have been few and far between.

This extraordinary piece, depicting some sort of alien interaction in a future vision of Earth, was painted over a couple of days, and the work in progress shot provides a little insight into Woskerski’s method. It looks like he sketches up the elements of the piece and then ‘colours them in’ which is quite an unusual way of going about things, but he is wonderfully successful at it.

There is such a sense of movement created by the dogs, which have been so accurately captured, but the star of the show for me is the serene face belonging to the girl wearing a hoody/space helmet to the right of the piece. Woskerski is such a massive talent, and it was a real privilege to welcome him to Bristol for Upfest 2022.

5256. Upfest 2022 (66)

Such has been the productivity on the streets over the last year combined with my attempts to post as much as I can, I have completely neglected my Upfest 22 posts, which really isn’t very impressive. I will try to squeeze in as many as I can whenever I can, because there was so much quality art to see from what was a very successful couple of days at the end of May 2022.

I had to have several goes at photographing this magnificent piece by Anthroe, but it is the damn cars that make it so challenging. The piece itself is a fabulously colourful portrait of a woman holding a bouquet of flowers, with what looks like a petrol pump (surely not) in her left hand. The whole piece is set on an abstract patterned background. This is one of my favourite pieces of the festival by an artist I don’t know at all, but I believe that he lives and paints in Los Angeles, so it is great to see this piece here in Bristol.

5255. M32 Spot (164)

How truly wonderful to see a Skor85 piece for two big reasons; the first is that I haven’t seen any of her work in an absolute age, and secondly, she is one of the nicest, kindest and most bubbly artists in Bristol. Even better is that this is one of two pieces she painted during this paint jam organised in the M32 Spot by Conrico.

The column piece looks like a mash-up of a portrait with a design idea, and kind of comes in a top and bottom half. The portrait below seems to portray happiness, but is somewhat at odds with the deer design above, which is more stylised and looks ready to go onto the front of a Christmas card. I am puzzled by the rune on the deer’s forehead… is it an expression or is it a tag? I think the former. The whole thing is a welcome return from Skor85.

5254. Greenbank (82)

This post gives you a sense of how far behind I am with my posts and how difficult it is to keep up with the sheer volume of street art and graffiti writing being painted in Bristol right now. The wonderful piece by Pekoe is from an Easter paint jam with her RBF crew friends.

Pekoe has spent this spring concentrating on her letters, and it is always great to see artists pushing and challenging themselves. I think that Pekoe may struggle a little with straight lines and that she might benefit from writing a more curvy word – there are a lot of straight lines in PEKOE. The fills are lovely and typical of her style, and the eggs a nice festive touch. More writing from Pekoe in the pipeline.

5253. M32 Spot (163)

I think that the Bristol artist who has stretched the most so far this year is Zake. He has consistently been expanding his repertoire pretty much with each new piece and is becoming more original with his designs and ideas. This recent wizard piece at the M32 Spot is a great example of how varied his work is becoming.

Although it is easy to see, in this column piece, the traits for which Zake is best known, namely the use of light and dark shading to create depth, it does not scream out Zake on the surface, and had it not been signed, it would have taken me a little while to work it out. An unusual and fun piece from the Spanish face specialist.

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