Category Archives: Street

Preview: London Pleasure Gardens

June 30, 2012 butterfly 1 Comment

The Paradise Gardens is a free family festival and a feast for all the senses in the new London Pleasure Gardens site. Featuring a vintage fair, performance arts, live music, pyrotechnic galore and all kinds of entertainment, this is definitively a destination for the summer. But a festival wouldn’t be the same without street art and graffiti…

Fresh from Paris, Shepard Fairey and the Obey Giant team finished a large scale mural.

To top it all, celebrated US street and graffiti artists Risk, Ron English and TrustoCorp are joining in and completing outdoor intallations, as part of Letters of America. The project then continues its UK invasion with an all-American Independence Day celebration – in association with Corey Helford Gallery LA on Wednesday, July 4 at Black Rat Gallery.

Full set of pics by Butterfly here

Check the LPG programme

London Pleasure Gardens
Gate 1, North Woolwich Rd, London

Paris, Street

Paris: Shepard Fairey mural – Day 2 x video

June 27, 2012 butterfly 2 Comments

Following our earlier coverage of Shepard Fairey’s monumental mural in Paris ( see here), on day 2 the Obey Giant team starts working on the flower at the top right of the building. Having tried the cherry picker myself, it’s very windy specially at such height (40 meters high).

Full set of pics by Butterfly here

Due to the enormous size of the wall, an authorisation from the local authorities was needed. However this entire project has been totally unfunded and all the participants and organisers have volunteered, so we would like to say a BIG THANK YOU to all the contributors for their time, hard work and making this happen:

Shepard Fairey, the Obey Giant team with Dan, Nick and Z, the organisers with Mehdi from Galerie Itinerrance, Jerome Coumet from Mairie du 13e, Butterfly as well as Mahmoud Belakhel, Ingrid Zeller, Matthieu Soudet, Romain Paget, Julien Hogert, Jonathan Ricquebourg, Rebecca Topakian, Pierre Bézard, Laura Fernandes, Maïa, Marouène, Valentine Poutignat, Julien Soudet, Felipe Quintelas, Fabio Caldironi, Kan, Sowat, Herve, Hugo Vitriani, Patrice Grellet, Philippe Langlois and the residents of the building.

Paris, Street

Streets: Da Mental Vaporz new mural in France

June 26, 2012 butterfly 1 Comment

For the Graffitizm event in Mantes-La-Jolie, 50 km from Paris, the prolific French graffiti crew Da Mental Vaporz with Dran, Blo, Brusk, Kan and Jaw completed a 40 meters long mural featuring their signature “Exquisite Corpse”, full of vibrant colours and imaginary characters .

Paris, Shows, Street

Paris: Nick Walker TMA

June 24, 2012 butterfly

To close the loop on a year long project I have been following (covered here) British artist Nick Walker was in Paris for the release of the awaited TMA print, The Morning After, at the Opera Gallery.

Nearby luxury shop owners were shocked to discover people queuing, a first for French people and specially in the most prestigious district of Paris, at the corner of Place Vendome, home to Cartier. “What is going on, shall we call the police?”.

It was interesting to see the cultural differences, as some UK die hard fans crossed the Channel to sleep overnight in front of the gallery, while French people turned up later in the afternoon.

While wandering in Paris, Nick Walker also stopped by to put a stencil featuring a new female vandal character, admiring red paint on her Lauboutins boots. In broad daylight and in front of bemused passer-by.

Full set of pics by Butterfly here

Paris, Street

Paris: Shepard Fairey Mural – Day 1

June 21, 2012 butterfly 2 Comments

When I met Mehdi from Galerie Itinerrance in Paris at the Mausolee exhibition, little did I know that we would be involved in an ambitious project with Shepard Fairey a few weeks later. Working jointly with the Mairie of 13th district and the local community on a project called Street Art 13, they help regenerate the area by providing big walls to talented artists. After seeing this massive 14 storey building, I joined the project and we agreed that it would be awesome to have an Obey mural in Paris. Luckily Shepard Fairey was not only interested, but also wanted to paint the wall instead of putting paste-ups. So exciting!!!

Shepard and the Obey Giant team are operating on a very tight schedule, in between the opening of the Levi’s Store in the Champs Elysees and the temperamental weather. So French artists Sowat and Kan from DMV crew, Mehdi and myself can’t resist joining in to help for the first layer of red.

Shepard begins his stencil process, and the woman’s face starts to take shape.
The mural design is taken from Obey’s artwork called Rise Above Rebel.