Painting Walls: Graffiti, Street Art & Urban Art

Last year, the car-manufacturer Mini celebrated its 50th birthday with a great art event. In addition to the controversial discussed, but inspiring KRink vs. Mini action, ten other well-known artists, including urban artists like Seak One, Tika and Smash137, created their custom-styled Minis. Ten very different car-styles were created by the very different artist, whose single similarity was, that they never painted a car before. For that reason, they used a lot of different techniques to customize their Minis: cleaning, sluicing, omitting, spraying, scratching and painting were only a few. ...

If your aren’t Scottish, you have maybe never heard about the great and fantastic “Ghostvillage Project”. Some weeks ago, six more or less renowned urban artists - Timid, Remi/Rough, System, Stormie Mills, Juice 126 and Derm - meet each other for three days on the west coast of Scotland to repaint an abandoned 1970s village. Working together on huge collaborative walls and individually in hidden nooks and crannies all over the site the artists realised long held dreams and were inspired by the bleakness and remoteness of the site. Drawing on the history of the village the artists’ stated intent on completion of the project was to populate the ghostvillage with the art and characters that it deserved. (Agents of Change) ...

Some days ago, Jaybo Monk and Remi Rough meet each other at the Style Project Room in Berlin-Mitte, but before I write something about the “Jaybo Monk vs. Remi Rough” live-painting, I will wish you a happy new year, with a lot of creative ideas and great inspirations… Born in France, Jaybo Monk came to Berlin in the 80th. Because of the variety of media, he uses to create his urban influenced artworks, and the fact that he’s the founder of the important “Style” magazine, he became a influential figure on the urban scene and internationally famous. ...

I love it to see paintings and other artworks at abandoned places like old factory sites or derelict ruins: The power and colorfulness of the artworks in contradistinction to the gray, grungy and lifeless buildings and walls. When I saw photos of Iemza’s abandoned paintings the first time, I was really astonished! The French artist creates fantastic abstract creatures, which bring back life to their brown, gray and dirty walls: ...

British street artist and designer Dave The Chimp recently started a new sales game to make some fans of his artworks happy and to get some money for the cold month. Currently, I read about that “Lucky Dip” lottery and thought, that this playful way of art disposal has to be supported. It’s very interesting, because it’s a combination of lottery and sale… “If you’d like to get your hands on an original “Human Bein” painting, plus a signed copy of his book “Part of Rebellion 2: Dave the Chimp”, and some zines, all for just 35 euros (40 euros outside of Europe) then drop him an email and he’ll send you the instructions of how to play the Lucky Dip.” (hooked) ...

The last I wrote about the artspace “Projectroom” in Berlin, was the article about the Herakut live painting several weeks ago. This time, the true talented urban artist Marco Grassi aka PHO painted live at this location! While he did his interesting performance, some other guys filmed him and made a crazy time-lapse video. PHO approached street art for the first time in Paris. He is now one of the major protagonists of the Italian street art scene… ...

Do you know Dan23? No, it’s no new spray-paint. He’s an very interesting French urban artist, who did a lot of great (spray-) paintings in urban landscape…I recently read an article about him and thought, that you should also know him and his really good artworks! [dailymotion x96cj0 nolink] Dan23 is from Strasbourg, in France. His street art became famous because of its awesome combination of stencil techniques with a very own way of painting, which is minted by a lot of splatter effects. ...

It’s wonderful to get to know, that creative people around the world steadily develop new techniques for making the urban landscape more colorful. A really new and astonishing concept is the so called facadeprinter by Martin Fussenegger and Michael Haas, which was already in use at the urban art fair “Stroke01” in Munich this year. It’s a unconventional machine, which allows to create a new, previously non-existent form of urban print media - it’s an inkdot-printer in architectonical scale: ...

Do you know Augustine Kofie? He is an US-American urban artist, who usually paints walls and creates mural artworks. I recently found a nice time lapse video of the making of one of his murals and thought, that you maybe are interested in taking a look at it. In this video, he paints a wall at an old church: “This former church has hosted many a late night event as well as a number of commercials and reality TV shows. The retaining wall is actually the buildings side stairs as well as a handicap ramp, so the shape wasn’t exactly square as most walls I paint are. I worked the shape of the wall into the left side of the mural. ...

Yeah! Some minutes ago, I found a great time-lapse graffiti mural video…There are a lot of graffiti and mural art videos in the internet, but they’re rarely as good as this one! Three crews, the Pirates, Stereofarm and Spring69 got together to create a fantastic colorful masterpiece and a amazing time-lapse video of the making-of for the international “Central Illustration Agency” (CIA). ...