Mar 28, 2013 | street art
Sharp swoops emerge from the walls of parking garages and the sides of buildings, the one below is covered in shades of electric colors layered according to saturation with the densest boldest blue on bottom. The lettering seems to jut out into three dimensions, forming abstracted S-shapes with dramatic twists and extensions that reach up to the whitened top. It’s almost like a conglomerate of unfinished CGI designs from an oriental-themed Transformers movie, painted in lovely bold colors.
Sometimes the shapes take simpler forms, individual pieces of three-dimensional abstract shapes floating in space, usually arranged around the shapes that surround it. They form composite designs that are electrified by the power of whatever force keeps those shapes above ground, and the bright colors that slash their way through the forms only amplify the piece’s momentum. This 3D graffiti is created by the Italian artist Peeta, and his splices of futuristic bundles cover walls all over Italy.
September 2012, Banja Luka (BA) Graffiti Writing Jam
Peeta is also known as Manual Di Rita, and he has been a graffiti artist in Venice since 1993. By breaking down typographical forms and remaking them into dynamic shapes with deep shadowing, the whole design recesses into the wall. He said he particularly focuses on the lettering in his own name, Peeta, playing with the shapes of the letters and how much they can be twisted to become something else.
In an underground parking in Milan Italy, April 2009
In the Venice Industrial Port, Italy.
“Thus my own lettering is brought into the fluidity of the urban, where words are continuously ruptured from their own histories, readapted into idiom and gestures learned off the street,” he said,
“The final result derived from the fusion between traditional lettering and three dimensional style has ended up in giving life to a unique kind of visual rhythm, created by the intersecting lines between sections of conic, cylindrical and twisting surfaces. The role of sculpture comes to be essential for this purpose. It represents for me a direct contact with three-dimensionality in order to understand the rules of light and shadows and to reproduce them.”
Wall in Milan, Italy
For more of Peeta’s work, check out his website & Flickr.
Mar 18, 2013 | street art
Three of the Angry Birds sit on a wire. They look just as unhappy as they do on your iPhone, except we’re not the ones controlling them and they don’t seem to have much of a purpose with no blocks or green elephants to knock down. Here they’re perched on the edge of an actual wire fixed to the outside of this building – gray followed by red followed by yellow – three little puffs of color with makeshift tails and upset eyes. There’s no reason for them to be angry on this wall but otherwise we might not recognize them.
Alexey Menschikov is a Russian artist peppering the streets with his brightly-colored art while pursuing photography in black-and-white. He turns something physical about a fence or a wall into the starting point for each drawing, combining something that’s actually there with something two-dimensional, merging his imagination with reality in a public place. Often these physical lines start out as cracks or wires, but Menschikov turns them into ground lines and tree branches and perches birds or shapes or shadows on top.
The saxophone is the subtlest of them all, each of the three brackets that hold the pipe to the wall stretch out to hold up the painted shadow of a make believe musical instrument – turning something ugly and functional into the idea and shape of something beautiful. The saxophone’s slender neck slips down to ground-level and loops up.
The little yellow bird that sits on cracked red pavement has his eyes closed. The tree branch he struts across has only become more than a crack in the ground because of one little painted bird.
Alexey’s second pavement crack turned tree branch happens on gray ground – the little tree reaches up from the manhole cover that caused the crack, and it’s painted with pale green leaves. On the right branch sits two little owls, one mommy and one baby, both with eyes wide open and green-yellow bodies simply decorated.
All images from the artist’s Live Journal.
See Alexey’s Facebook page for more of his work.
Feb 22, 2013 | street art
by c215 in Vitry-sur-Seine, France
I can’t get enough of the way this girl was painted. The lines on her face echo and dance in bright bouncy colors that give her expression a sense of motion – almost urgency but not quite. The lines almost look like skinny little fish, swimming through the colors, some synchronized in groups and some scattered and rushing along as quick as they can.
Street art is so great because of how impromptu it seems, and when you see it yourself it’s always the happiest surprise. France looks like it might be one of the best places to see it – a lot of whole building sides taken up with larger than life scenes that brighten up the cityscape. Even small quirky street art like the one on the right makes you smile, and brightens up a boring sign just a bit.
My favorite street art from France fills up this post but if you know another country whose street art is worth describing, comment and I’ll make a series out of it☺
at Montmartre, Paris, France
by Liliwenn Bom K in Brest City, France
in Brest, France
by Alice in Vitry sur Seine
in Chambery, France
in Brest, France
Images via Creative Guerilla Marketing.
Aug 6, 2012 | street art
These pictures are from some beautiful street art I passed yesterday. I tweeted out an image, but decided it deserved its own post, especially since it takes up an entire building. You can find it for yourself on 3rd Street between 2nd Ave and Bowery.
Shadowed birds fly towards her with fervor, surrounding and overwhelming this anonymous person as she covers her face in despair. The paint is rough and dripping in all places and like most street art, this only makes it more beautiful since it’s being forced to survive outside on the New York City streets.
The birds fly from beneath written words which read:
paradox will assume new meaning
and be found to be the language
which the intuition uses when the intellectual currency has failed
the use of paradox
does not spring from a desire to mystify
the hearers or oneself
it arises from
the inability of language to
say two things at once
Jul 10, 2012 | news, street art
Faif, a Barcelona-based street artist, has been making some pretty great stuff lately, poking fun at how seriously we take art and society in general.
I really like the “roped off” “framed” pieces along the wall in the second picture below. The ropes block us from seeing that line of the piece, which makes sense because they’re meant to keep us back and away from them anyway.
Like walking into a snarky cartoon full of meaningless labels that point out how stupid all labels actually are.
