Category Archives: Urban art

Easing in, winding up.

My mighty spray paint fume extractor was finally fitted a couple of weeks ago and I was pretty excited about seeing it in the new space and more importantly, getting to use it again. To ease myself in nicely, I decided to revisit a couple of old friends and give them a new look. So here are the first couple of paintings I did after moving in, Wound Up & Let Down, both on vintage wooden printers trays with 24ct gold leaf. Both available to buy, so drop me an email if you like the look of them. Available individually or as a pair.

Sickboy – Heaven & Earth

I had a sniffly call from Mr Sickboy a while back and he very kindly offered me the opportunity to not only collaborate with him on his upcoming London solo show, but to work alongside some other great artists such as Lister, Vhils, D*Face, Will Barras, Connor Harrington, Eine and more. Well the time has finally come and the show opens tomorrow, from what I hear, it’s going to be a little bit special.

For full details on the event visit Sickboy’s website, and if you’d like to attend the private view tomorrow (Thursday, November 3rd) please email rsvp@thesickboy.com with the subject:RSVP.

 

Stolen Space Summer Group Show

If any of you cool kids are living in and around London Town, then you might want to get yourself over to Stolen Space Gallery tomorrow for the opening preview of their summer group show. I’ll have a little paper-cut piece on display amongst what will be a great collection of work by a great collection of artists.

Pop over for a beer and say hello!

Click for larger version.

 

Dreweatts Urban Auction

Dreweatts have another Urban Art Auction taking place tomorrow. My painting ‘String Theory’ is up for grabs so if you fancy bidding on a bargain visit the Dreweatts Website.

Demons.

Here’s a few scribbles of some Demons. They’ll be included in an interesting group project I’ve been asked to be a part of alongside some huge names within the *cough* Urban Art scene including D*Face, Paul Insect, Eine and a few others.



These are just a handful and I had a lot of fun getting loose and busy with my brush pen. They’ll eventually be screen printed around a wooden xxxx which will then be xxxx. I don’t wanna give too much away just yet and spoil the surprise but I’ll let you know when there’s more news.

Back from Africa.

So I’m finally back from The Gambia after ‘curating’ the first every Wide Open Walls arts project. It was a tough few weeks, with many highs, plenty lows but the most important thing, lots and lots of incredible art.

I’m not sure where to begin with this one really, a million miles from anything I’ve been involved in before I’m not really sure what I expected. I guess I’ll start with the good stuff, the positives, because there was plenty of them. First of all, the team I got together was incredible, and I shall blow my own trumpet and sing their praises no end. It was a very tough job for everyone in many ways. The environment was challenging, the heat was relentless, humidity was high and sweat was never in short supply. Things were unpredictable out there, you never really knew what you was going to paint from one moment to the next and as soon as you’d finish one thing, you were guaranteed to have at least one villager leading you somewhere new to paint their compound wall or mud hut. It was difficult trying to keep everyone happy as there was so much wall space, all really spread out over quite a large area, we could only do so much, especially in such intense heat. But, with all that said, Logan Hicks, Lucy McLauchlan, Matt Watkins, Mysterious Al, the Broken Crow boys and resident photographer Ian Cox handled everything that was thrown at them with such inspiring patience and professionalism that regardless of the problems we encountered, and there were quite a few, we were all able to stick together, help each other out and keep going.

The villagers we met and hung out with on a daily basis were also incredible. Friendly, kind and always ready to help in any way they could, even if it was just holding stencils or shaking paint cans. Not only did they make us all feel so welcome, they were genuinely excited and thankful for what we were trying to achieve.

It was an amazing thing to be a part of and an experience that I’ll never forget. I met some incredible people, made some fantastic friends, saw the most beautiful wildlife and worked out of my comfort zone. I painted pictures on trees, stood amidst a Baboon riot, saw snails as big as my fist and ate every night under the gaze of a barn owl who tried to shit on me.

Here are a few of my photos from the trip. I strongly suggest you head over to the Wide Open Walls Blog and the Flickr page for more amazing shots of what we did out there.

Wide Open Walls – An Art Safari

Busy busy yet again and as a result my bloggage hasn’t been getting the care and attention it needs, poor bloggage. Still got a load of photos I need to sort out and upload to my flickr, more video footage I need to put together and if you haven’t noticed already, my website has been given a total redesign thanks to rndm.net which STILL needs more content and general ‘stuff’ doing. I’m hoping to start selling some very limited quality prints of some of my photography as well as some very affordable doodles, but all in good time. For something else is happening right now that is priority number 1, Wide Open Walls.

If you’ve been following the blog or my Twitter for some time you’ll know about this already but if you don’t (and you should), in a weeks time I’m flying out to The Gambia to transform the village of Kubuneh with spray paint in the hope of encouraging tourism to help with the poverty problems that the people over their struggle with on a daily basis. I’ve been curating the project alongside organiser Lawrence Williams of the Makasutu Culture forest and managed to twist the arm of 7 other artists who are also on board and ready to paint over a 2 week period.

The artists are Eine, Logan Hicks, Lucy McLauchlan, Xenx, Mysterious Al and Broken Crow, need I say more? For more info and regular updates on the progress of the project PLEASE subscribe to the W.O.W blog and Facebook page and help spread the word about this incredible project. We really need everyones help on getting behind this so please tell your friends, spread the word and help the W.O.W project really get out there.

I’ll be updating this blog AND the W.O.W blog as often as I can whilst we’re out there to keep you all updated on how it’s going and include you as much as we can on the journey.

City Slickers and Lots of Stickers.

Finally back and rested after a weeks onslaught in a blistering hot Brooklyn. Much fun was had, many French Bulldogs bothered, lots of stickers stuck and what should have been a 2 man show was turned into a solo show at the last minute. Can’t complain with that!

Thanks to everyone who came to check out the new work and party down in the yard, hope you all had an awesome time. Thanks to Rae at Brooklynite Gallery for allowing the madness to continue, Seth and Nick from Pawn Works for their awesome stickers and most importantly thanks to my man Mark from Up The Arts for his usual assistance, hard graft and moral support.

I’ve decided to teach myself the art of shooting and editing video (in the build up to bigger things), and below is my first ever production. It’s just a quick movie full of test shots taken with my Nikon D90 while we were out there, then edited together in iMovie 09. Amazed at how simple it was to put together, wouldn’t mind having a crack at Final Cut next for a more solid finish.

I’ll be putting together a different cut at some point over the next week, focusing more on the show and the work. Here’s a few shots from the night taken by the gang at Brooklynite and Clay Williams from Examiner.com

Show Progress

Painting away in the yard at Brooklynite Gallery ready for the show opening this Saturday. Check out more photos as they get uploaded here.

Theft, coincidence and the collective consciousness.

Well I thought for once I’d use my blog for something other than zombie trailers and utter nonsense. It was brought to my attention today that what seems to be quite an old argument has risen it’s ugly and quite boring head yet again. Way back in 2002 I created what went on to be my first well known image, Shat-at. How do I know it was 2002 exactly? Because I remember exactly where I was when I created it, and more to the point I have the very first original file I worked on that still has the date info associated with it. Some time after I’d already painted this image quite a lot around east London and on canvas for people, a very similar image was brought to my attention by artist and illustrator Casey Burns. Below you can see both images and the obvious similarities.

Who came up with the idea first? How should I know?! Did I steal the idea from Casey Burns? Not in the slightest. Did he steal the idea from me? Again, I’ve no idea. But is it really a case of plagiarism? Or maybe, just maybe, that out of the 6 billion people on planet Earth thinking up ideas every single second, 2 of them, living at at either ends of the globe came up with the same idea. The idea itself is hardly like dreaming up the theory of relativity. An AT-AT from the Star Wars films looks like a dog, wouldn’t it be cool to paint a picture of somebody actually taking it for a walk? BOOM! There it is. Yeah, it certainly is a big coincidence that both images appeared within a year or so of each other, but I doubt it’s a case of theft.

But this brings up an interesting case that I know has been discussed a lot already, especially over the last year or so; where exactly is the line drawn between influence and plagiarism? And another question, can 2 (or more) people really come up with the same idea within the same time frame?

Let’s take the first question to start with and use examples from what has become known as the world of ‘street art’. Off the top of my head I thought quickly about a few artists who’s work are quite similar in style and content and I’ve put a few examples below. Let’s start with a pretty obvious one.

Warhol's Marilyn

Banksy's Kate Moss.

MBW's Madonna

Banksy taking the first step to create a humorous play on the classic Andy Warhol image, but then Mr Brainwash following suit and using the idea yet again, this time Madonna being the focus. So who is MBW ripping off, Banksy or Warhol? Is he ripping anybody off at all, can it be filed under ‘influenced by…’? I think knowing what we know about MBW after his starring role in the recent Banksy film, it’s probably safe to say his influences for this image very much came from Banksy. My PERSONAL opinion on this one is that to regurgitate an idea that’s already been coughed up once before is really pushing it, but this seems to be a recurring theme that surrounds the controversy of MBW and I’m not gonna get sucked into that discussion right now.

Next example, D-Face V’s Paul Insect.

Paul Insect’s Jimmy Hendrix Dead Rebel

D-Face’s John Lennon.

Both artists released a successful series of very similar images based around various dead musicians all in stages of decomposition. I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure Insect’s work was released first, but does this mean D-Face has ripped him off? I’ve no idea, he could have been sitting on this idea for sometime and from experience (examples of which I’ll go into shortly) this could very well be the case.

Paul Insect’s ‘Poison’.

Miss Bugs ‘Mother’

2 Artists who have been known to be very similar stylistically, but which side of the line would you say they fall? Is there quite simply a strong influence here or is it something more?

Rene Gagnon

Banksy

Obviously 2 VERY similar images but can it be put down to a massive yet quite innocent coincidence? A quick google search for ‘boy praying’ and the original source photo used for both images is on the 3rd page of results, so it’s hardly a hard to come by image. Rene Gagnon was first off the mark from what I’ve read, but does this mean Banksy has blatantly ripped him off? I guess it could be possible that Banksy was totally unaware of Gagnon’s image before he released his own, stranger things have happened at sea. But what if he was aware? Quite uncharacteristic behavior for an artist who has quite deservedly risen to the top of his game through the quality and originality of his work and ideas. A simple change of clothing for the boy would have been an effort, but both are identical. also quite interesting how one has devil horns, the other an angel’s halo.

Banksy’s Nola

My ‘Not Everything is so Black & White’

Here’s an example I can safely say for sure was a total coincidence. My piece was sketched out and ready to paint before the release of Banksy’s Nola and after seeing the similarities, I decided to ditch my idea at first and just put it down to bad luck, a classic case of sitting too long on an idea only to be beaten by a more pro-active peer. But then after I realised how much I liked the image and I knew that I wasn’t trying to rip anybody off, I just went with it. And why not? Banksy is hardly the first person to paint someone holding an umbrella, and I doubt I’ll be the last.

I know all of the above isn’t the greatest argument and discussion in the world, simply because I don’t have time to go into a total balls out essay on the subject. But I guess my point is that coincidences occur, it’s just part of life. I also wonder at times about the theory of humanity sharing a collective consciousness in some way, and how artists are said to be more in tune with the unseen ideas and thoughts that surround us. I’ve seen many examples of it in the past to support the theory and wonder if it’s such a crazy idea. The brain operates though a series of electrical impulses, maybe these waves of electricity aren’t confined to the inner workings of our own minds.

And yes, there’s always going to be people who will take the easy route and just blatantly rip somebody off, but I’d like to think that people would have enough foresight and mindfulness to try and work out which side of the line the work falls, theft, influence or simply innocent coincidence.