Day 113: The Fruits of Planning

In my days in Vienna I had come across the occasional street art down a back alley, but hadn't really seen much. Any city with such a tradition of the arts -must- have street art somewhere though, so in all that downtime I had I started researching and planning. Between the internet and an urban culture magazine I marked 17 (yes, 17!) locations on my map that were promising to look for art, and mapped out a route to cover all of them (I missed one, in the end - it was just too far out of the way and I ran out of time).

Things started a bit slow at first. Most of the commercial areas I'd noted had a lot of sticker culture, but not really any open walls big enough for much paint. The first few parks I checked out had a few things, but mostly just tags, and not terribly good ones. I had put this quest off in hopes for a dry day, but I ran out of days before Vienna ran out of rain, so I was also hiding under trees and awnings periodically when the rain picked up.

After lunch things started to pick up. I hit a few really nice parks, and then after a few more duds I hit the real sweet spot along a canal offshoot of the Danube. Both sides of the canal had paths with fairly tall brick walls perfect for large art, and they were crammed with paintings for kilometers.


After spending an hour or two walking both sides of this stretch I continued on north to the underpasses of the main freeway over the Danube, which turned out to be another great hotspot. After a massive amount of walking through the day I decided to give up on the last location and take the subway back to the hostel. It was dark by this point anyway, and while I'm leaving the actual art for follow up posts (both general ones and a few artist spotlights) here's one to end with.