My last visit to Purdown ended up being rather fruitful, which isn’t always the case. I have been up there to walk the dog of late and there has been absolutely nothing worth photographing, that is until now.
This is a rather nice crocodile piece by Kool Hand that has a little bit of a story going on. It looks like our croc friend is little hungry, tempted by a swimmer’s feet overhead. A but of fun on a small piece of wartime concrete from Kool Hand.
Trainers are quite a common motif in street art, and this is a fine example from 3f Fino in the tunnel, painted during a recent paint jam with LRS crew friends. The brown shoe, nicely designed in a cartoon style, is stuck to the floor with some sticky green goo (chewing gum?), where we find the letters FINO. 3f Fino also recognises his crew with the letters LRS making it into the soul of the shoe.
Set on a red background, there is a lot to like about this piece, as it is different from the regular stuff you see on the street. 3f Fino is not short of a creative idea or two, and it is probably high time I published a gallery of his work.
As you read this post, I should be some 30,000 feet in the air, on my way to France. Timings of posts over the next week might vary, but I intend to continue posting while I am away.
The last couple of visits to Bristol by Logoe have resulted in only two or three pieces, which is worth mentioning, because typically we get to see a rash of five or six per visit. This piece was painted over the Christmas holiday period, I think, and bears all thee hallmarks of a great piece of Logoe writing.
The colours are suitably subtle, and the palette nicely worked out. The dots are rather different in so much as they are running in vertical rows rather than the customary horizontal splash we usually see. The letters ‘Logoe’ are really nicely written, but if I am perfectly honest, slightly masked by number and size of dots. Another fine piece of writing.
I have been meaning to post this outstanding and captivating shopfront commission by Tanith Gould in Cheltenham Road since I first saw it a few months back. Finally, over the Christmas break, I managed to get out on foot and grab some nice pictures from the opposite side of the street.
It is great to see what Tanith Gould can do at scale, and she has absolutely nailed it with this octopus piece over two levels of the building. The words “for where your treasure is, there your heart shall be also” sounds like a quote from Pirates of the Carribbean (especially with the octopus prompt), but is actually a biblical quote (Matthew 6:21)
The piece is beautifully finished, and has enough detail and mischief to keep you looking at it, and it seems to work perfectly on this old city shopfront. I would love to see more commissions from Tanith Gould, who thus far, has been painting on the streets with the Bristol Mural Collective at their occasional paint jams.
I am guessing that Slakarts is busy these days in his non-street art life, because 2022 has been a very quiet year for him, and this is one of only a handful of pieces I have seen in a long time. This is how it goes for most street/graffiti artists, peaks and troughs of activity for a multitude of different reasons. It was fabulous, therefore, to come across this piece up at Purdown.
Slakarts tends to maintain his central character, pimping it with ever more elaborate ideas. In this piece, the character is on the left, but the whole piece is a bit of a mash-up of randomly distributed elements of the character’s features, a nose, teeth, an ear and a tongue are thrown into the mix. Nicely designed and thought out. Let’s hope Slakarts can get out more in 2023.
When designing and planning monster pieces, the only thing stopping you is lack of ideas (and talent, obvs). Well it seems that Mote’s imagination is firing on all cylinders, and his menagerie of curiosities continues to grow with this ‘all teeth and eyes’ monster at Greenbank.
I am not sure how much longer this long hoarding will remain, because the development behind it is moving at pace, and already about a quarter of the hoarding has come down. Mote has used the space well, and as usual the monster is filled to perfection with great solid colours, and a little bit of a fade in the purple section. Another day, another monster from the fabulous Mr Mote.
I had a great catch up with Face 1st as he was assessing where to paint this stunning little design. He had thought about using one of the flat walls on the buildings, but instead chose this curved wall instead, and what a great choice he made.
Any piece on the ramps of a skate park get scuffed up pretty quickly, naturally, and when I photographed this it was only a day old, and you can see immediately how worn parts of it have become. Face 1st has painted a laughing girl’s face sliced through vertically, exposing the letters F, A and E, with the C sitting proudly on the girl’s pink bow. A wonderful piece from a lovely artist.
Doors 206 – More Bristol (and France) street art and graffiti doors
I have found myself, once again, with very little time to sort out Thursday doors this week, so I am rummaging around in my archives for some more street art/graffiti doors, all of which have appeared on Natural Adventures before in posts about street art. These doors were originally posted in February and March 2022, although the photographs range from April 2016 to March 2022. Enjoy.
I won’t be posting any doors next week as I will be enjoying the snow in France once again, but I will, of course, be thinking of you all. Have a fabulous weekend.
If you have made it this far, you probably like doors, and you really ought to take a look at the No Facilities blog by Dan Anton who has taken over the hosting of Thursday Doors from Norm 2.0 blog. Links to more doorscursions can be found in the comments section of Dan Anton’s Thursday Doors post.
by Scooj
An artist who never gets enough ‘airspace’ on Natural Adventures is Werm. He is really prolific and has been turning out his own brand of stylish graffiti writing on a fantastically regular basis.
This excellent gold on red piece was painted in the tunnel alongside his LRS crew mates, during the very wet spell at the start of January. The colour fade in the letters is blended perfectly and also contains a few stars and spots for good measure. The writing spells out WERM, but has a kind of symmetry about it that is rather pleasing. This is a first class piece of writing from Werm.
I suspect that I begin quite a few posts featuring Mudra’s work with the words, ‘Mudra is absolutely smashing it at the moment’ and that is probably because Mudra is absolutely smashing it at the moment.
His signature pieces, usually painted on black buffed walls, have been coming thick and fast over the last year, and this one features a walking character, smoking a cigarette, alongside the letters NTS, the crew he paints with. Mudra’s work is always easy on the eye, smooth curvy lines and soft fills – there is something quite laid back about their presentation. Many more to come in 2023 I’m sure.
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