Banksy vs Robbo pt.98

Latest version, this one by Team Robbo

Everyone has heard of Banksy, maybe not everyone has heard of Robbo. Robbo was in his words the original and a pioneer of the street art game. He tagged and painted his way around London in the 80’s before it was cool or indeed profitable to do so. After a while he retired, he made no money out of it and felt it was for the younger man.

A young Banksy met Robbo and they had a bit of set to and Robbo claims to have given him a slap.

Fast forward a few years and the grudge comes back when Banksy paints over an iconic Robbo piece with a workman putting up wall paper. Cue a long running, slightly petty, rather amusing, visually interesting tete a tete.

Click here for a run down of some of the shots

Get well soon anyway Robbo

Cross Stik

Nice lil addition to a Stik piece in Shoreditch…. almost looks like the character is peering down on the artist painting over his legs

Bit of Stik

Primrose paint

Bank Holiday wonderings too me over to Primrose Hill this weekend and as always I kept my eyes peeled for any examples of street art. It will not shock you to learn that the pristine streets of NW1 do not feature that many pieces.

This piece was on the bridge over the canal and even this was probably commissioned by the council.

Still there are some pretty colours I guess

Pretty.... vanilla

Too many sweets will rot your toof

I think I might be having a bit of a sugar overload here. I can not turn a corner without seeing another piece by Mr. Toof. You have to give him credit though he goes far and wide and does not mind hitting some pretty random places.

Spotted the toof?

This one was in a warehouse carpark on the way to Stratford and pretty damn hard to find, I only spotted it out of the corner of my eye.

Things i’ve seen…

Hugo Bossman

Ghetto Blaster

Horror

One Oyster that will not raise the blood pressure

>Insert expletive here<

If Oysters are meant to be an aphrodisiac then this has turned the whole country frigid.

I am literally astounded sometimes. Is this the most aesthetically boring thing you have ever seen?

Just so boring....

It looks like something made using Paintbrush circa 1995, the font is boring, the art work is childish without any of the cute innocence a child might have brought to the design, the colour choices can only be described as vanilla, the image of the Queen is dull and shows no vibrancy…. was this done in a lunch break by a tired of life member of the design department from a soon to be defunct packaging company in a industrial estate in Slough? and now breathe….

I understand you can not go crazy with design for the Jubilee Oyster card, but you can show imagination and verve. London is going to be besieged by visitors this summer and their travel memento will be this. Hardly shows London as the multi-cultural design hub that it is.

Rant over…. what do you think?

The world’s biggest egg hunt – Great Faberge campaign

Clean eggs

In London for the last month or so there have been 200 painted Faberge eggs dotted around, all huge and painted by a wide variety of people from Zandra Rhodes to my fave by Benjamin Shine who made a London Postbox homage.

I was going to go on a mission to find them all to show you them, but then I realised that I can wait until April to see the whole lot in one place, Covent Garden. For anyone visiting London from the 3rd April you have a chance to see the entire collection until the 9th.

Check out the full range, some are amazing and some are poop, but that was bound to happen. If anyone wants to buy me the Benjamin Shine one then I am open to certain favours…. maybe

I still think it might have been an interesting idea to bring in some more unknown street artists or even a couple of the bigger hitters such as Ben Eine or even me with my finger paints…

Things I’ve seen…

It is the final day of my little break from work and therefore the amount of galleries and mooching I can achieve will be much less. From here on in guys I am working for a living again, with that in mind I thought I’d sign off with a few images I took today.

Just off Mare St.

Corp...

Love this, mix of freehand, stencil and even print outs I think. I have not got a head for heights so not going to climb in order to find out

Along the canal

Urban redevelopment - face the facts

You can tell the Olympics is just around the corner, even the empty flats in the Eastend have been given a lil make-over, we wouldn’t want our touristy friends to see un-used boarded up eyesores. Bravo Hackney council

Just propped up in the Eastend

It's only a door dear

I’ve said it before, Street Art does not need to be beautiful in the classic sense, I’d take a nice and simple piece of humour over some of the staid stuff you can see… this is very cute

Terry O’Neill – Reworked – Rook & Raven Gallery

el Tel

London is awash with exhibitions at the moment and a fair few of those are free. Terry O’Neill has shot some of the world’s most recognisable faces and this remix of some of those pictures is really interesting, if a little too brief. It only opened last week but the Rook & Raven gallery felt a little empty.

O'Neill + Dawe do Bardot

Aside from the number of pieces to ogle, it was good, I like the space and the uncluttered approach. I was looking forward to seeing James Dawe and my favourite pieces were from Dawe, combining collage and digital techniques to give the images an almost stencil street art effect.

O'Neill + Dawe do Stones

Daniel Lumbini‘s Jagger piece is cool too, showing a very young Jagger, looking rather feminine and with ladies hands reaching all over him, as was the reality in those early gigs.

O'Neill + Lumbini do Jagger

Then there is the British national treasure, Mr Elton John, I prefered the original to anything that had been reworked.

O'Neill does Elton in Windsor Great Park

 

Another type of social commentary – Ben Drew

Street art and graffiti is social commentary, beit that little known stencil artist Banksy and his inclusion of rats, police et al or simple RIP and gang tags. So is music although it seems there is less than in previous years when you had Rock rebelling against Vietnam or the Falklands or Punk sticking two fingers up at Thatcher and her conservative mob. More political and angry music would not go amiss in these days of vanilla RnB crap.

The latest recording from a certain Plan B is accompanied by a pretty dark video, stripping back his thoughts on the world his peers live in and the world that lead to the London Riots of 2011. The imagery and lyrics are dark, but it is a strong story to tell and maybe it will make society evaluate rather than sweep under the carpet.

Middle England will probably only know Plan B from his last and very successful album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, where he wowed them with his soulful voice, I am guessing they were not aware of his previous incarnation as a potty mouth. I quite like the image of a Daily Mail reader picking up the new album Ill Manors and being shocked to a minor heart attack.

A very typical Daily Mail.... Cnuts

Plan B speaks with some clarity about the need to understand why the riots happened and how there is always a different perspective to understand, his statement here almost feels like getting his defense in first before middle England attacks, rest assured they will.