London Art

Tom and I went up to London yesterday for a day full of art-ness. We originally went only to go and see the Moniker Art Fair and the White Canvas Project, but then decided that since we'd be in East London might as well do a walking art tour around the area courtesy of Griff and www.streetartlondon.co.uk, which actually turned out to be way more interesting than both the fair and the White Canvas Project.

Ben Wilson gum art 

Wiki

Stik

Phelgm

ROA

Me & ROA

Stik

Stik

Pablo Del Gado @ Pure Evil Gallery

Pablo Del Gado @ Pure Evil Gallery

Another ROA

Insa

Half an El Mac peice, other half covered up by white van man.

Real Blaine Fontana peice at the White Canvas Project

Ben Slow

C215 at the Moniker Project

someone who I forgot the name of at the Moniker Art Fair, just thought the photo looked cool.

Hush at Moniker Art Fair, & saw him selling 8x10 pints for £99.00 a peice.... 

Hush at Moniker Art Fair

Space Invader

Christiaan Nagel Mushroom

EINE

Cityzen Kane

Shepard Fairey in the flesh putting up a piece for his show next week at Stolen Space

Tom stoked to see Shepard

Another ROA

SWOON

A bunch of people looking at Shepard Fairey wall paper paste.

Conor Harrington

Phlegm & EINE

C215

Stik

C215

Christiaan Nagel Mushroom

We also saw a few Banksy pieces, but everyone has seen those a thousand times over. 

Tom speaking to Shepard Fairey

I was a little to shy to go and say hello to Shepard Fairey. After Tom came back and I asked him what he said and he said "Oh I just said, 'You see that girl over there, that's my wife, she wrote a paper on you, how steal artwork'..... just joking." It's only a little bit true. In university, many years ago, I wrote a paper on Copywrite infringement. Part of the paper focused on street art and explored how many corporate advertisers and crap graphic designers were stealing artwork from street artists and getting away with it. For a small portion of the paper I talked about Shepard Fairey and his appropriation of imagery, sometimes art. 

In high school (over 10 years ago now.... uhh) I really started getting in to graffiti.... as in looking at images on the internet, not going around town spray painting... which opened my eyes to street art eventually. It was the first art that I encountered that wasn't traditional art that we learned about in art class. Before writting my paper that included Shepard Fairey, I wrote a paper about Street Art and Graffiti, exploring their similarities and origins. At that time though, there weren't a lot of actual book on the subjects, not like now and my citations page was a lot of blogs, forums, and Wooster.  I followed street art for a really long time, becoming slightly obsessive. Not so much anymore, but there are still some Artists I follow and still really appreciate what street art is all about. All in all yesterday was a huge success.

The end, ned.