Street Artists – the best artists

Forget all those celebrity artists and take a walk round any city to look at some real works of creative art. In London it is around the East End, especially around Brick Lane and there are so many examples that change quite rapidly. It is an outside art gallery and you need to be looking up and down as well as around you. If we weren’t looking down we would have missed this piece. It is probably no more than 20cm tall but it is so clever with the shadows drawn onto the pavement as if the sun is rising from behind where the actual wall is. If you are in London for whatever length of time you should visit this part of the city. Copyright Paul Andrews and Caroline Schmutz, Junagarh Media, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk

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Now If I Was A Betting Man

Fortunately for me I’m not. It looks very enticing at times in that somebody has to win but invariably there has to be a lot of losers as well for there to be a big winner. My partner took this photo of some very good street art in the East End of London. It is a very detailed piece of work and is a play on a well known chain of betting shops in the UK. Copyright Paul Andrews and Caroline Schmutz, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk

Les invisibles sont invincibles

A photo of some simple but perhaps prophetic graffiti from a wall near the centre of Lausanne in Switzerland. Which part of society does the phrase cover? Those on the edges or perhaps even us the 99%. Copyright Paul Andrews and Caroline Schmutz, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk

Slurp – Some unusual road graffiti in Shropshire England

It is not often, or not where we drive anyway, that you find some graffiti on the road itself as was the case this day when we took this photograph at a road junction in Shropshire.  Since we were out in the lanes and far from the nearest village or town, presumably the artist had just been driving around with a pot of paint or two and decided that here was going to be the spot. Copyright Junagarh Media, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk.

Street Art – Seasonal spoiler Santa Fe Argentina

I took this photo just after Christmas on a very hot sunny day walking along the promenade of the River Parana in the city of Santa Fe in Argentina. The stencil artist created this piece telling children that Father Christmas does not exist. As the promenade is very popular with families I wonder how many children asked their parents if it was true. Copyright Junagarh Media, http://www.junagrhmedia.co.uk .

Christmas themed advertising

I took this photo at this time of year a few years back. It was a very simple advertising hoarding for a major corporate and somebody had very subtly altered it. If you look at it though in some ways the alteration is wrong in that shouldn’t it be the baby that is seen as a source of dollars for Fisher-Price? Photo copyright Junagarh Media, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk .

Vinyl record flying bird street art Paris

I think this is a great piece of street art, very clever and fairly unique although maybe it has been or is a copy of other creations somewhere around the world. And even if has been this a superb use of materials. You can see more of our photographic work on our website http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk. I wish that I was as gifted as the person who created this piece of work.

Clever Loco – a steam train at the top of the world

A few years back, quite a few, we were very fortunate to backpack around the world and see just how amazing it is, just how much humans are screwing it up and how much they are screwing each other. We kid ourselves if we consider ourselves in any way civilised. With 780 million people without access to clean drinking water I think we are as much in the dark ages as we were over half a millenia ago. Anyway I guess that’s another story. So we spent a lot of time in South America and at one point found ourselves in Uyuni in Bolivia. This town is the gateway to the famous salt flats and sits at 3700 metres so is a bit chilly at least for us. It is also the site of a fascinating train graveyard about a kilometre or two outside the town. It appears that when steam engines were no longer used they drove them out to the desert. When we were there and hopefully it has changed you could just clamber over these industrial monsters without having to pay anything. Such a shame since it so obviously be a tourist attraction. Considering the distance from the town we found this locomotive daubed in white paint with an Einstein equation painted on the side. What do we call this, technical graffiti, technical street art, it is certainly an interesting piece of work.

Space Invaders – They are all around us part 1

I’m a great fan of street art and tasteful graffiti where our cities are canvases often for people without a voice or just a place for some fantastic artists to display their work. This is a photo taken from Lausanne cathedral looking over a wall of the grounds at the rooftops of the city. And there high on one of the chimneys is a tiled space invader.  You have to ask how did it get there? Did the person or persons have permission to put it there? Does the owner of the building know it is there? Or did the artist, like some human cat, just decide that this was a place to place one. Maybe not to everyone’s taste perhaps but this is so subtle I don’t think it does any harm whatsoever. Unless of course our human cat put his or her foot through the roof.