A gallery of wonderful character pieces and graffiti writing by Bristol’s awesome Cheo.
All photographs taken by Scooj.

















































A gallery of wonderful character pieces and graffiti writing by Bristol’s awesome Cheo.
All photographs taken by Scooj.

















































Well here we are again with another colourful piece by Diced Mango in St Werburghs tunnel. I said there would be more from him and I am true to my word. The ends of the tunnel are always hard to photograph because of the encroaching bright light from outside which bleaches half of the picture. I hope that you get a good idea of this in any case.

What I really like about Diced Mango is that I think he is relatively new to painting on street walls and his work is getting better with each outing and he seems to be experimenting a lot with letter shapes and colours/patterns. It gives me great inspiration and I hope to be doing this kind of thing in a year or two.
When you see a piece like this in blue tones with a dash of white and it is so incredibly clean and tight, you can only stand back in wonder and admire the extraordinary talent of Bristol’s Cheo.

Cheo usually paints character pieces, and I don’t think there is anyone better at creating this cartoon style anywhere in the country. Every line and shadow is immaculate and skilfully laid down. As always he has marked the piece with his signature bee. This was a lovely surprise piece to find in Dean Lane and is another little reminder of the world class street art scene in Bristol.
A fitting tribute
to the girl who changed the world
a work in progress.
by Scooj
I can’t express how excited I was to see this last week, but it appears that Tian has been on another tour of Bristol and has left dozens of paste ups in the Stokes Croft area. Although He came for Upfest 2016, his last wheatpasting drop was in April 2016 so it has been some time, but how utterly worth the wait.

Over the next few weeks I will post more of his pieces. Once again he presents us with stencil work that has been printed and pasted up and this first design appears to be a Japanese scene with a geisha. If any of his past work is a guide, the piece is probably taken from a famous film, but I don’t know for sure.

Unusually for the work of Tian that I have seen, this piece diverges from his normal sepia-toned pieces and in fact if you look carefully there are two different tones of orange used in the versions of this wheatpaste.

These four paste ups were from various spots on my way to work… what a walk that was. I seem to remember it was raining quite hard but it simply didn’t matter I was in street art appreciation mode.

Loads more to come from this fabulous French artist.
This is the last in this little sequence of Shoreditch pieces from November 2018. I feel I have to post them because they are just too good not to share. Although I have loads of pictures of Thisone’s work in my archives I have never actually posted any of his work before and I hope this will be the first of many.

This work is larger than his typical pieces but contains some of his key themes, which are the use of black and white paints only, an animal of some kind and beads and jewelry. When I first saw this piece I thought it might be a swan, but on closer inspection the beak is taht of a gull of some kind – maybe an albatross? Whatever it is, the whole thing is very beautiful, and I am pleased to report was still on this wall when I last visited in April.
.
While the cats are out
two hours with a can in hand
I squeak with delight
.
by Scooj

An artist whose work I have long admired is London-based SkyHigh. His work is always immaculate with fabulous clean lines and complex designs. Most commonly he spells out his name using a contrasting style for each letter and somehow bringing the whole thing to life. His pieces almost feel like animations as the styles spill over from one to the next.

This one using pink tones with black is in my view one of the best I have seen, each component skilfully laid down to create a magnificent whole. I particularly like it that roughly once a year SkyHigh makes a trip to Bristol, and one of his pieces has lasted for probably a year or more. Always top class.
My visit to Shoreditch, London, back in November last year reminded me of a significant difference between the London and Bristol street art scenes. In London, there is a strong wheatpaste movement, and in some places there is barely a square inch of a wall that isn’t covered with a paste up. In Bristol on the other hand, wheatpastes are a rarity, and are normally provided by visitors to the city such as Face the Strange, D7606, Tian, Losthills and of course qWeRT. The last frequent Bristol-based wheatpaster was Kid Crayon, but he has moved on to spray-painting now. I think Kedals might be the only one doing it at the moment – room for some new entrants?

This is a little collection of wonderful googly-eyed paste ups by qWeRT which are dotted all over the place in Shoreditch.

qWeRT’s pieces are always rather cute (a word I rarely use) and endearing, like this one holding up a banner saying simply ‘need more love’.

I have always liked this form of street art and qWeRT’s work in particular.
Sometimes it is just too difficult to talk about how good a piece really is, because the words used are clumsy and don’t really do the artist justice. This is a case in point. It is a zombie piece (not to everyone’s taste) by JXC, an artist I have come across a couple of times at Upfest.

Everything about this is good – an arresting subject, incredible precision and artwork, great colour selection and a level of detail rarely seen on the street. As an observer, sometimes it is just so hard to comprehend how these guys do this with spray cans, I am left in awe. As you can see, I rather like this piece which I photographed in London back in November last year.


