Street Art 8

Robert Rauschenberg

You can see his influence on the 60s and 70s, especially I think some of the street art of the early 2000. Personally I’m not that fond of his work. Perhaps it is my ignorance. But I don’t see those delightful tricks of the eye that I see in other artists. In short, it looks too serious to be serious.

See No Evil

There was a street art gallery established in Bristol England. Some of the work is quite spectacular. I’ve never been a big fan of graffitti. My mommy told me not to write on the wall. But this looked like quite a show.

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Anthony Lister

Anthony Lister is a street artist. His work is graphic. Violent. Very expressive. And he’s having fun with it. I’ve often consider riding around Toronto taking photos of the street art that I’ve seen. Some is good. Most is derivative. Its just tagging. Signatures left all over the place. Like you used to see in washroom stalls. But Lister’s work is good. The thing about street art. No matter how good it is, it is temporary.

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BLU and David Ellis

This is another one of these collages/animations in which the environment is the canvas. There must be a lot of preparation time involved in this. I’m wondering if they do all of this on paper first and then shoot it. You’d have to have some kind of script. What is so intesting is that they include the artists in the animation as well and yet your eyes are riveted to the story line.

 

BLU

This is a video called Big Bang Big Boom. It is created by a group called BLU. Fabulous stuff. It is a combination of murals, animation, street art. Let’s call performance collage. Because that’s what we need, another category.

Thom Thom aka Hephaestus or Thomas Louis Jacques Schmitt

Street art. I’m new to this. Its always looked like graffitti to me. But then I saw this guy. Thom Thom aka Hephaestus or Thomas Louis Jacques Schmitt. His work is so interesting. Many years ago I did a similar type of work. But on a very small scale. His work his billboard side. But even the small images we get to look at are very interesting.

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He has also created a video to show you how he works.

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat

This is the last sort of art that I think I would have entertained as interesting. But Basquiat’s work is interesting. He doesn’t paint pictures so much as tell stories. There is information in his work, data, impressions of anger and sadness. These are like cave paintings. Or the early bible creations of monks. They assault you with a collage of data. Impressionistic in a non-visual way. A lot of what I see reminds me of Picasso. The sad thing is that this artist is dead. And his life has been romanticized. Which means his work could take second place to people’s curiosity about the artist.

‘Jean-Michel’s early years were spent with his middle class Haitian father, Gerard, who was unable to fulfill his son’s need for nurturing and recognition. To fill the void, Jean-Michel hit the streets of New York at a young age where art became an outlet for his anger and empty childhood. Also known by the tag “SAMO,” Jean-Michel’s unique brand of graffiti was found throughout Manhattan as early as 1976. “His work from the first consisted of conceptual, enigmatic combinations of words and symbols, executed with the curt simplicity of a late Roman inscription”, according to Henry Geldzahler, longtime curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.’

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Michel Basuiat movie trailer