Things got off to a pretty rough start as I had some delays in the morning and with the subway, and I was fearing I might miss the start of the tour and then be unable to find the group. With a bit of running and some fortunate educated guesses I was able to get to the starting point before they left and was pretty content just to have made it. The weather was a lot chillier today, but the tour was incredibly interesting. Even though I'm more aware of the street art scene then the average person I still thought of it as almost entirely spray painting but wandering the streets you quickly see what a wide range of mediums there are now, and how things have evolved. Most of the stuff never lasts a year because it gets "cleaned" or covered or by other grafitti or taken down, so there's a constant evolution of the art around and having a guide who can explain to you each piece, the artist behind it, when it was done and in many cases anecdotes about different teams, rivals, inspirations, etc was a fascinating insight that made me glad I didn't just go and look at things on my own.
To give an idea on some of the range of art, the first piece we were shown is by a very eccentric artist named Ben Wilson. He's famous for painting pictures on the old pieces of chewing game that have been worn into the cement over the years. He heats them up with a hair dryer, paints what he wants on them, and then seals them with some sort of varnish so that they are more durable. Apparently he got arrested once, but police decided they couldn't charge him with anything because he's painting on gum, not public property. Apparently he's painted something like 8000-10000 pieces of gum over the years. Another very famous artist (I actually knew of this one) is Invader from France. He's famous for going to cities and putting up dozens of mosaic tiled characters from the Space Invaders video game hidden in different places and getting people to hunt them out. In one city in France he planned out their hiding spots so that if found and plotted on a map they would draw a giant "Invader" over the city. Some other non-paint art included little plastic pink pigs hidden unobtrusively (our guide said they were quite new and nobody knew who was doing them yet), ornate tribal masks, and mushroom statues sprouting from rooftops. There was, of course, a lot of painting as well. A few of the big names were banksy (of course), Ben Eine (of whom Obama was given a piece of art as a gift from the British PM), Stik, roa, Nemo, Malarky, etc etc etc. I'm not going to bore everybody with all the stories and discussions of how the artists have evolved, but here is some of the art!
Again, I'll put the rest up when I find an image site that lets me add images in groups and not just individually.
Afterwards I stayed in the area and found a place to finally get some good Fish & Chips. There was also a pretty awesome "vintage flee market" that had old vintage clothes, furniture, metalwork, and basically every other sort of vintage item you could imagine. I might split this up into two posts tomorrow to get some more pictures in (of both the art and the stuff afterwards) but this will have to do for now.
