Graffoto Round Up of the Year - Part 4

Photos by HowAboutNo and NoLionsInEngland


And here we have it folks, part 4 of 4 in the round up of 2011.

This final look at the year now covers September all the way through to the end of December. Being that it was mild for the time of year, and there were a shed load of art festivals and paint jams in town, the surrounding areas had a nice smattering too.

Street art pastes and stencils seemed to be out of the window for pretty much most of this quarter, and I think that was also a big shift for the year. Good to see more talented artists grafting it at the side of a wall. Also nice to see lots of quick and dirty damage throughout town.


Rowdy/Horror, photo HowAboutNo



Rusht, photo HowAboutNo



Shane ODV, photo HowAboutNo



Roid MSK, photo HowAboutNo



D*Face in progress outside the Moniker Art Fair, photo HowAboutNo



And completed, photo HowAboutNo



Various, photo HowAboutNo



Gold Peg, photo HowAboutNo



A solid year for the machine of graff that is Probs. Think this is my fave piece he has done ever. (photo HowAboutNo)



I think we'll see a bit more of JimmyC in 2011 (photo HowAboutNo)



Motor, photo HowAboutNo



C215, photo HowAboutNo


, photo HowAboutNo


2011 was the year Ronzo turned his hand away from sculpted pieces to graff.....and a welcome turn it was. This piece painted with Conor Harrington


photo HowAboutNo


Evol impressively buggered about with scale this set of blocks making up a mini housing estate complete with Elk, Drax and Shun tags. Read more about his visit here


photo HowAboutNo


Banksy did quite a few street pieces, all outside Soreitch - consequently I didn't get off my lazy arse to photograph them. No bother, this was my favourite thing he did all year anyway.


General and most lovely damage . . . (photo HowAboutNo)



Swoon, photo HowAboutNo



This superb paste up by Gaia lasted no more than a few days and was fly posted over (photo HowAboutNo).



Revok/Roid at the most single hit "legal" spot in Shoreditch (photo HowAboutNo).


Don’t believe the nay-sayers saying the scene has tanked, looking back we have been overwhelmed with top quality shit on the streets of London in 2011. Stuff that should have got a mention earlier but just got missed in the admittedly random selection process includes:

Phlegm was down several times during the year


photo: NoLionsInEngland


One of the highlights of the year was the privilege of seeing Sweet Toof and Paul Insect collaborate on this stunning rooftop piece, and in case you missed it, the timelapse is here


photo: NoLionsInEngland


Elbow Toe


photo: NoLionsInEngland


This Chu sticker made us chuckle earlier in the year


photo: NoLionsInEngland


So that's it for Graffoto's round up of the action in 2011. At the beggining and at lots of points throughout the year it did seem like it was stale and not moving anywhere. Part of wanting to look back at the year at the begginging of a new one has shown that it was a busy and colourful year, full of lots of new names and techniques and people to watch in 2012.


The shift also seemed to go towards lots more "with permission" spots last year, I guess a big test for those shutters and areas may fall closer to Olympics time, when the council may decide to buff at random for no reason whatsoever.

Happy 2012. Fuck The Buff.

Banksy Loves Liverpool

photos: NoLionsInEngland except where noted



It has been a while since Graffoto’s last penetrating insight into walls damaged by Banksy. Those Banksy posts were easily mistaken as springing from passion for street art when in fact the intention was to publicize Shellshock's brilliant gift sized tome "Banksy Locations and A Tour" which is currently available at the crazy smackdown price of £7.50 inc P&P (UK only) if you go to Shellshock’s online shop here and type in the sneaky hidden code "shoptilyoudrop". The main reason we haven’t written much about Banksy is there is generally little to say that isn’t bleedin’ obvious from the image but his recent stuff raises a few thoughts.


Close by Bond Street in the heart of the UK’s most extravagant perpetual consumer fest, Banksy took advantage of a very tall wall on an empty building to create this beautifully executed falling women and shopping trolley. Its height and scale give a real sense of peril and plunge to the piece.


"Shop Till You Drop"


The drop shadow Banksy has painted on the wall give the piece an attachment to the wall, shadow is a clue telling us she is meant to be falling down the wall rather than it being a picture of her falling through mid space.




Up in Liverpool we came across this vapour trail love heart. Using stencils, spray can and fire extinguisher as the medium, this wasn’t a quick stencil reach.




The plane is beautifully stencilled, the black layer over the white layer has the feel of a Banksy and to clinch it*, the identical composition has been found this week in East London. Only Banksy has operations with the scale to pull off such stunts.


*oh - and it's now up on his website


We tend to think of Banksy as a flat stencilist, painting the stencilled areas with solid fill but Looking closely at the plane Banksy has applied a fade along the fuselage nicely blending where light falls on the upper surface and gradually turns to darker shadow underneath. A similar fade and graduation was evident in Tesco sand castles in St Leonards.


Photo HowAboutNo


The curious thing about the love plane image is the application of a drop shadow on the wall, it has a radical impact on the picture. Without a shadow, this would be an image of a plane in the sky creating a love heart. However, with the drop shadow added the plane is now pulling off some kind of acrobatic stunt along the wall, it becomes a picture of a plane flying down the side of the wall painting it as it goes. With Banksy, nothing is accidental so what did he intend by flying his bi-plane down the side of the wall?




Another curious feature is a stunning similarity between the heart in the Banksy piece and the logo of a sinister Liverpudlian mind manipulation cult called City Centre, a sort of tourist board for shops and “attractions” in the centre of Liverpool.




The similarity seems too striking to be coincidental and the image is located in the heart of the zone promoted by “City Centre”. If Banksy meant the heart to allude to something specifically Liverpudlian, then what? It may be that it is actually pure chance, I mean why would he put up the identical image in East London if it was intended to have a specific Liverpool resonance? Scousers – calm down and explain here.



I like the way the plane is beginning its climb to the heavens just yards from a street sign obligingly directing the plane upwards. This interaction with its environment is a far better take away than the idea of its location in an area hyped by an organisation using the same heart motif.


One for obsessives to anorak over is the rare use of a device such as an extinguisher or bicycle pump or something for the heart in this Banksy piece. A fire extinguisher can be opened, filled with paint, re-pressurised and then used for artistic purposes as demonstrated here by Banksy. Filling a fire extinguisher with paint isn't for the faint-hearted but haven't we all at some time or another filled a bicycle pump with paint? Graffoto put its collective brain cells together and finks the last time Banksy used a fire extinguisher was probably when he painted BORING on the side of the National Theatre in London.


Photo nicked from someone who probably nicked it from someone else and so on.
If this is your copyrighted photo, thanks for reading.



Personally, I think this has been a strong year for Banksy during which he has created many new pieces in the UK and they haven’t been so blatantly related to product promotion like the Exit The Gift Shop stunts last year. Many of the pieces have been "annointed" as genuine Banksy's by their recent addition to the photo section of his website.


There never was much doubt that the Love Plane and "shop Til You Drop" were by Banksy. One around which there was much debate was the latest instalment of the Banksy v. Robbo Camden Canal saga which is now part of a photo story segment on his website.




Another supposed possible Banksy which did very little for so many hasn't been blessed by an appearance on the Banksy website, though thats probably not enough to have its attribution updated to "unknown" which goes to show how little he needs to do to be perceived as having running street pieces.




I have to acknowledge the help of Banksy experts Shellshock (have you noticed how cheap his book is at the moment?) and Art Of The State for help in aspects of this post and I apologise if they had preferred that had remained a secret.

k-Guy & Occupy vs Greedy Bankers

All photos: NoLionsInEngland




A decent target and a good idea is all the motivation K-Guy requires for another politicised barb delivered through the medium of stencilled street art. Bankers and politicians are frequently a target for K-Guy and as usual, he delivers a simple message with exquisite timing and placement.


Spraypaint,Carpet (quality: Eastern European municipal office standard issue)


K-Guy is coming from the same ideological origin as the protesters. They see a need, they seek a voice, they cut out the official channels of protest by putting direction action into effect. K-Guy rolls out the carpet.




Throughout banking's casino years the watchdogs failed to bark, the cracks appeared with the run on Northern Rock in 2007 and shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in Sep 08 K-Guy nailed the genesis of the ongoing crisis in capitalism with his October 2008 Memorial To The Boom Economy alongside the Bank Of England.




Occupy has generated a substantial body of protest art around the camp and it was curious to feel a resonance with K-Guy’s earlier Memorial.




The pot pourri of organisations, faiths, individuals and objectives that make up Occupy pride themselves on being a true democracy. They aren’t too shabby at media management either. There is a packed itinerary of events taking place today (sat 22 Oct), check out the details on the website OccupyLSX. (www.occupylsx.org)


(got to be handy having the country's largest camping gear retail onsite!)


Having accompanied K-Guy to take some photographs of what he expected to be a very short-lived installation, I asked him if he was going to hang around to see what became of his carpet art, he shrugged and replied “my work here is done, I‘ve delivered my idea and now it has too look after itself". Some 30 minutes later the carpet was still there. It's well worth checking out K-Guy's track record with the political street art here, particularly relevant in the context of OccupyLSX is his exhortation that you might as well hoard your cash under the mattress, and photos of his Memorial To The Boom Economy can be found here.

More photos from OccupyLSX:
















What Happened Next?

The protest remains in place. The news is entirely about the right to protest and the friction within the church over its response to the prescence of the camp, which has caused one canon to resign. Virtually nothing is said about the aims of the protest. K-Guy's rug remains in place, nopw the attractive unique foyer carpet to a small tent.




The limelight has definitely been stolen by a monopoly based piece of work which arrived on site over the weekend. Some claim it is the work of Banksy, if it is Banksy then it’s a huge disappointment. It has none of his usual colour palette, none of his "style" and it just isn't that funny. With political jibes Banksy always hits the target with an anarchist's guided precision, this is just lame. Occupy is about democratic change, wealth re-distribution, smash capitalism etc, this monopoly piece is, at best, about greedy bankers with their hands out (as if to some kind of..ooooo....Stability Fund...). Why does it look so much like a straight theft from Zeus with an Alec monopoly character slapped on it?

Something Interesting About Banksy, Really!

all photos: NoLionsInEngland except where noted



Central London today saw a truck decorated by Banksy coming out of obscurity and into the full glare of the popular art commodity market.




Banksy comes in for a fair amount of criticism for being a stencil artist and therefore not doing hardcore freehand schizz or just lacking can control. The critic’s purpose normally isn’t to make Banksy small but to merely make the opinion holder look big. Banksy has never claimed to be a spray can virtuoso and this truck doesn’t provide compelling evidence of excessive modesty, it simply is a fairly average piece of spraycan art.




On one side a host of winged monkeys watch over a Mohican coiffed glowing red hammer wielding class warrior smashing the system, represented by a tv broadcasting an image of a gas mask.





On the other side is what appears to be a depiction of police fleeing from a bull armed with flame spitting artillery on its back, echoing the old Heavy Weaponry staple from the Banksy oeuvre.





One of the monkeys even has a set of cross-hairs on its face, so this is a composite of many Banksy signature elements, which is nice. I presume the goons guarding each corner were to add some frission of danger or excitement to the display, who knows, maybe Team Robbo would turn up.




So far so dull. Nothing particularly special about this piece it seems but I’d like to draw your attention to one aspect for which I think this does stand out. Come and join Graffoto in the world of the Banksy obsessive.




How can you tell your genuine Banksy from a fake made using a stencil purchased for a couple of quid off the internet. One way, you can buy a piece of art from his official outlets, they come signed or with a certificate from Pest Control and possibly a certification that the certificate is certifiably a certificate and so on, Another way, you photograph a piece on the street and wait to see if that piece is anointed by inclusion on the photo gallery on Banksy’s website. I think it’s true that if you have the necessary geekish knowledge, you can prove that the Banksy website is registered to people who are now or used to be proud mates of the legend rather than a fake website.


photo NoLionsInEngland, also seen at Banksy.co.uk!



Finally, back the day, this charlatan Banksy used to actually stencil tag his street art can you believe. By his own account he started stencilling because it freed him from the slowness of his painting and he evidently stopped tagging his work when things got a bit hot regarding the dubious legality of his work from a police perspective. Thanks to the natural life cycle of graffiti, his stencil tags are now a pretty rare find, particularly in such pristine condition and as large as the pair on this truck. (ok, since you obviously will start racking your brains, try the Manchester poodle and also Old Street Happy Chopper but you got to go some to some lengths to see that one).


Turbozone Banksy tag, driver side rear


Among last ones I found were this one up on a derelict site up in Islington, it used to authenticate a chucked TV identical to the one behind the Foundry and currently hidden under the “Rat Trap”. This site has now been built on and the tag was obliterated by the party wall.


Note the rare exclamation mark!!


Most recently but again this was a few years ago, I came across these rare indoor Banksy tags, knocked up in the private area behind a bar when he was doing a legal wall on a back street in London’s West End.




How long ago did Banksy last tag one of his street pieces? There is only one oracle to consult with a question like that and that’s Shellshock, co blog jockey and author of the various definitive-as-possible-without-actually-being-authorised quides to outdoor Banksies. Shellshock believes the last piece to be tagged is the 2006 Naked Lover in Bristol, I didn’t even realise it had a tag.




Other gems from Shellshock are that this is far from being the only Banksy lorry. I Banksy Locations and a Tour he mentions a truck painted similar to the Abi tribute piece on Sevier St, Bristol (book ref BR17) and also from the late 90s (I believe) here is the well known “Fragile Silence” Glastonbury trailer, though in his book Shellshock identifies Brizzle homies Lokey and Inkie collaborators with Banksy on that one.


Fragile Silence, still photo copyright BBC

It is interesting to compare and contrast the Banksy tags on the two lorries, look at previously observed change in the letter a.


Fragile Silence c. 1998, trailer tag, still photo copyright BBC



Turbozone Truck c .2003, passenger side front


So there it is, Banksy doesn't tag his public art any more, the old tags disappear as is the wont of this ephemeral daubing and suddenly, up pop two huge, sharp banksy tags. Try to get to see them via the Drewatts Auction (Cumberland Hotel, Monday 10 OCt 2011) and cherish their scarcity value. Another reason to catch this truck, Shellshock believes that of the various Banksy lorries this one is probably the least known and least photographed, until today I suppose.




I am as always hugely indebted to my great friend Shellshock who dissected my half formed thoughts and provided a ton of the facts which were an invaluable help in writing this article. Shellshock was the architect and guide of the original 2006 Banksy Tours in London and based on those he went on to publish the hugely popular Banksy Locations and Tours, now in its 4th edition in the UK. Then followed in 2010 the Banksy Locations (And A Tour) Vol 2 which covered Banksy street art in more graffiti locations from the UK. US readers may be interested to know that PM Press has just published Vols 1 and 2 of the Banksy Locations books in quite substantially amended and updated form.

PS – When I speak of Shellshock being the “go-to” guy for information on Banksy’s street art, I say that cos we discuss it so often and his knowledge is invaluable. I should say I often also discuss Banksy stuff with Art Of The State and Howaboutno who know their shit and just as equally are orifices on the matter.