I just got back from another visit to perth where i installed this piece at “Ezra Pound”, a rad little bar in Northbridge.
Miso was also in town working on this huge wall for the city of perth.
A couple of walls I painted on a recent trip to Tasmania… both walls are in Devonport.
It’s been a long week of 30+ degree days. We’re half way there, used about 250 cans of paint and should be finished before Christmas.
TwoOne and I will be in Perth for the next few weeks painting a massive 600m2 wall. We will do our best to post progress shots along the way. Thanks to our friend Edwin for these photos. More in-progress coverage here.
Some more images from Canberra by Twoone and Kelly. Byrd hooked up a wall the day we left. It was a rush job but it got done!
As artists we know the transformative power of colour, how it enriches our experience of the world. The Lets Colour Project aims to bring colour into the lives of people all over the world. The cynic in me sees this as a clever marketing campaign by some paint companies, but I’d prefer to think that those companies were finally made to realise that they could make a positive contribution to the world.
Anyone else keen to hit up Dulux and see if they want to give us some paint to brighten some dreary place? Or are there any places in Melbourne that could use a coat of paint? Housing estates come to mind… any others? Leave a comment.
Redbull NZ invited me to Auckland for Splore Festival, which was happening right on the beach! Lots of nice people and great nature. I painted on 400 Redbull cans. On Last day red each of thee cans were handed to people. I was there only for 4 days, but Auckland is great city I’d love to go back soon..
The first graffiti book I ever owned was about political and artistic scrawlings on the Berlin Wall. It was given to me by my aunt when I was 8. I was particularly taken by one very iconic piece by Thierry Noir and redrew it several times in different colours. I still remember the day the wall came down in 1989. It was an emotional day for a family that had left Germany for a better life in distant Australia just 6 years before that. I remember the family sitting around the TV watching images of men hacking away at concrete with pick axes, and Trabis flooding into the west of the city with a cacophony of tooting horns. Over the coming days the fairly sizable German community in my home town in Tasmania came together to celebrate with a string of barbeques and fancy dress parties.
Fast forward to 1996 and I was in Germany doing the solo travel thing as a teen. I took a trip to Berlin with the same aunt who had given me that book to join the city’s 7 year anniversary celebrations of reunification. The party was a bit of a fizzer as it was all just old news to Germans, but the trip left a huge impression on me. I understood for the first time the pain of oppression and could only imagine how artists felt in that climate. That Euro trip changed me forever, and among other things I did my first subway piece in Amsterdam, and I think I became a man that year.
Skip another decade to 2005 and I’m back in Berlin with my wife to live there for a few months. The Wall is now just another tourist attraction to most people my age. For them pre-reunification life in the city is a dim memory. The wall still stands in pieces and graffiti writers travel from all over the globe to put another layer onto this monument to rebellion and the art of graffiti. Of course for me it was very important that I paint my own little something.
I decided that I would paint a spot on the east bank of the Spree river, in the former Ost Berlin. I was planning on doing a daytime session so I had to be a bit sneaky and a bit cheeky to get the time to finish the piece. The only problem was I just couldn’t decide on what to paint. I felt like if I did some kind of political thing it would seem lame in comparison to any mark left while being near the Wall was still a dangerous place to be. After scouring the sketchbook I decided to paint something that was simply a piece of me for others to enjoy.