Graffiti, Marker & Spray Cans

The Agents of Change Augustine Kofie, Steve More, Remi Rough, LXone and David Shillinglaw recently have been busy in London, painting the largest mural in London, as was mentioned by Ian Cox who by the way took some great photos of this painting action! Keeping the geometry of the design intact is no easy feat especially when you can’t stand back and have a look what you are doing without negotiating six ladders and some traffic. ...

The guys, who invented the biggest marker worldwide and created their own graffiti mobile known under the popping name Everfresh, just teamed up with a couple of friends to repaint Melbourne’s infamous ACDC Lane for charity… Zoos Victoria is fighting extinction and has committed to ensure twenty native species do not go extinct on their watch. Enlisting the help of laneway artists from Everfresh and Blender studios, the fight has taken to the streets. The murals will help to raise awareness of some of these critically endangered species, many of which live right in Melbourne’s own backyard. For more info zoo.org.au! ...

For month now, the boys and girls of Cave Berlin are hardworking to make it possible to open the new, but still secret gallery space near Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin for the public. Now I heard that it’s probably April 27th, when Cave is going to open their three art spaces to the public, showing five artists and their works… But until then, there’s still lots of work to be done, as James Bullough and Addison Karl (JBAK) just showed when they painted this new collaboration mural in the Cave’s backyard, combining their contrasting styles into a mashup of antonyms: realism vs. illustrative, expressive vs. precise, hard vs. soft, black vs. a spectrum… ...

Do you remember How & Nosm, Nunca, Retna, Faile, Andrew Schoultz and around 25 other urban artists painting those old, abandoned (military) airplanes for the Boneyard Project? Recently, this new official video produced by filmmaker Jason Wawro was published, documenting mainly the ideas of this unique art event with statements by Faile, Andrew Schoultz and Bast, talking about their ups and downs (gravity and liquid aren’t friends!) during the creative process. The video also includes several amazing images of different plane painting processes and background info about the entire process. ...

Last Friday, Berlin-based Quintessenz Creation crew (don’t forget their upcoming exhibition together with Danny Doom in Hamburg!) was invited by a somehow popular sporting goods manufacturer to paint a mural at Sage Club in Mitte, which is why Berlin now has another colorful facade… Using nothing more than liters and liters of paint together with several alienated fire extinguishers, the Quintessenz boys bombarded the prepared wall (they previously painted a shoe silhouette using latex-paint) and created in that way meters long drips in different colors which now are visible from long distance. I for one took cover from the paint-rain and tried to take some photos from the roof, documenting the action. ...

Art censorship is not new, nevertheless it’s a problem everyone should care about. Paintings, images, murals, posters, stickers, and photos are transporting subtexts and opinions which is why certain governments, lobbies and other powerful people try to control those message by the use of extensive censorship… The latest popular example of art censorship is the story of British graffiti artist Shok-1 and his Heart Noose mural in China: Invited by the Chinese government to paint a huge mural back in 2011, Shok-1 painted a somehow controversial piece showing nothing more than a heart-shaped noose. I for one don’t know the deeper meaning of this symbol, nevertheless Chinese politicians decided to censor the mural by reinterpreting the entire image. Now, several weeks later, Shok-1 had the chance to revive his mural in London - far away from the Chinese governments reach… ...

As I already told you, Europe’s finest Da Mental Vaporz (DMV) crew left France and is currently in Melbourne, Australia, exhibiting at Rtist Gallery and painting large murals as this brilliant clip by Matthew Harding shows… Nothing more to say, except: Well done boys! For more info about DMV, check out their former show in Toulouse and their great exquisite corpse mural in Brest, yo!

Graffiti room design is one of those trends, companies are using to improve their PR. The hotel Au Vieux Panier in Marseille is regularly asking artists to design one of their rooms - this time, they asked famous, self declared graffiti fetishist Tilt, who is well-known for painting onto female bodies and painted London’s Village Underground not long ago… …I first told them that I wasn’t interested doing just decoration in the room but I wanted to create something that will look more like an installation. I thought about it also as a huge canvas where I needed to think about the composition and play with the empty white part of the room to accentuate more the idea of Chaos on the other part. Then I asked my friend Tober who gat a great old school style for tags, Grizz who is also the man behind the camera and Don Cho who is a Hip Hop singer from Marseille but who used to be a tagger from my home town Toulouse. It took one week to do the whole thing cause the idea was to exaggerate what you can usually see in some abandoned places. Too much tags, too much drips, too much sentences, too much throw ups… What I also wanted to show is that people can appreciate any type of graffiti, even the more basic, it’s just a matter of point of view… ...

I just stumbled upon this neat, short graffiti animation film by some Danish guys combining a common graffiti story with some nice fantasy elements: The film tells the story of a young Afro-American writer, entering a train yard via hidden shady paths. Arriving at his target - a train of course - the youngster misses a certain flow until an officer and his dog try to stop him and he, by an unlikely series of accidently events, creates the masterpiece of his life… ...

Projects, bringing together different arts are almost always my taste, especially when they combine spray-paint and modern technology. The official music video Who Cares by Symbiz Sound is such a project… In cooperation with students from Braunschweig University of Arts and the Institute for Comupter-graphics of TU Braunschweig, Symbiz Sound created this awesome video, combining Rasta hairstyles, exquisite dubstep sounds, live graffiti action, performance and paint with the latest digital production techniques (keyword: Virtual Video Camera). ...