BRING THE PAINT!

Our home city of Leicester's banged itself right on the map lately. 

We won the snooker championship in 2016; the same year that Leicester City rose from the dusty levels of Third Division football to win the Premier League against all the odds, and only a year after the city's magnificent reburial of King Richard III, whose body had been found right where the chairwoman of the Richard III Society had always believed he was, under the letter R in a city centre car park (that car park now turned into the King Richard III Visitor Centre, which I worked on with Studio MB).

The city has always been my closest, and its transformation began in earnest 20 years ago when major work began to expand the three universities there. Alongside De Montfort University's soon-to-be halls of residence ran the river, Western Boulevard, and a row of buildings about to be demolished, behind a mile-long stretch of hoardings.

It was these hoardings that graffiti artist and long-time mate Solo One gained permission and funding from the council to paint, end to end, creating the largest piece of continuous graf created to date (over a mile). 1996 did indeed see Solo work himself to a husk, recruiting artists from around the world to come and throw paint at white spaces. The energy was big, the colour bigger, and the art was destroyed, as all street art must ultimately be, when the development was finished.

Here's a great little film by Solo One of the original Western Boulevard event, cut with May's event 21 years later:

Twenty-one years later, the energy returned with Solo's Return of the Macks, part of the larger, council-supported Bring The Paint Festival, organised by Leicester's paint-and-pen lovers' cave Graff HQ, from whence I buy my Poscas and Grog. As soon as I heard Boyd had set it up, I asked for a spot, no matter how small, as we wanted to part of this anniversary extravaganza.

We had a modest space alongside the towpath at Frog Island, on a sunny but windy day, and stood next to 'real' graffers working at lightning speed with the kind of casual experience and confidence acquired through years of midnight throw-ups, hitting two cities in one day and climbing to precarious spots to get a chroma up. All were welcoming and just as accepting of my slow spraying and help from a brush as they were the schoolkid next to me working on his first big piece, supervised by his Dad, clearly an experienced graffer - yes we're getting to that age now - and the atmosphere was one of calm, shared productivity, someone's system blasting the perfect drum'n'bass mix at the end of the towpath.

Live footage!! Proof I put paint on the wall myself:





Look at these guys, embodying the spirit of 80s graf!
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Think this leaf had the painting blues...

The work along the towpath was breathtaking enough, but meanwhile in the city centre gigantic pieces were being finished by the infamous, incredible Smug, Boogie, Cantwo, Hombre, N4t4, Inkie, Philth, Voyder, Zomby and loads more. I'll let the pictures do the talking, as it were (bearing in mind we worked till very late, and it was dark by the time we hit the big stuff!)

(How did he get it so SHARP??)

The work will remaining place for as along as the elements allow it to.

If you love large-scale work, murals or graf, Leicester's the place to visit right now - and you can pack your day in the city centre with more delicious food, good ales, galleries and shops than at any time in the city's history.

Thanks Solo One for letting us be part of this inspiring event!

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Drew is a ****

Personal work, or off the clock work, can be a 'big-gulp-of-air' opportunity to do something you wouldn't normally do, or it can be another vehicle to produce what you're known for.

When people commission you, they're doing so from a catalogue of things they've already seen - ie; your folio. Which is what a folio is for. But this means they're always choosing from what's gone before. But it's the stuff that you do outside of your folio, often the unpaid work, which moves that folio forward. Otherwise, your folio would stay frozen in time - and you'd become boring and uncommissionable in no time.

So shows, personal projects, requests from mates, tattoos, unpaid pitches, these all provide such opportunities. As do local art projects. I have to be frank and say I have never get involved in those - our local paper has a history of featuring aspiring young creatives, musicians, actors, artists, only for them to crash and burn before ever reaching their potential. Call me superstitious, but no. I shan't be going in the local rag, or doing anything which might get me in it.*

I made an exception for this project, run by my friend and ex-teaching colleague Alisha Miller. I really wanted to do it. 'Decorate a meter-high MDF sunflower however you like, to be put on show as part of a trail through Nuneaton Town Centre with loads of other sunflowers.' 'Does it have to be about Nuneaton?' 'Up to you.'

So I thought about what I know of Nuneaton. I do have a real fondness for the place. My Dad worked there as a probation officer in the 70s and early 80s, and we often went to his office and hung out. We also went to Wales Chippy as children - and still do now, for a crinkle-cut treat - and my first pair of contact lenses (so grown up at 16!) came from the optician in Bond Gate.

Growing up, 'the hard kids' came from Nuneaton. We were scared of them but secretly fascinated. I thought about how public art projects in troubled places can be received. Badly - a waste of money. Graff'd up, kicked, leaned on, spat on, decorated with chips and 'chuddy'. In fact our sunflower broke before painting, and I felt bad for my butchered piece of public sculpture, but the idea was born.

What, I thought, would happen if the vandals loved a piece of art so much they wanted to express that, but in the same way they'd express sneering cynicism?
Real graf from the area was collected for reference, and the rest is a combination of real-life names, dialect and phrases, acrylics, Molotow paint, Tipp-Ex, Poscas, Hardcore© markers and sheer physical exuberance.

The result is summarised with the bit of blurb generated for the label:

'What would it be like if the vandals loved what they saw? Nuneaton, much-maligned and oft-abused, holds many fond memories for me. Lifelong relationships were formed in the Sunny Nunny of my youth.
The flower underneath is pretty, but the love and raw enthusiasm expressed over it is beautiful.'

In the end my piece was censored and politely stood in a gents' clothes shop with its naughty back to the wall, its broken stem mended, so it didn't communicate quite the way I had intended it - loudly, rudely gleeful, and outside, happy to degenerate with the elements. I'm not sure it's what was expected, which was, of course, the point. Alisha loved it, and the energy and humour I piled into it is there for all to see.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Go-See-Sunflower-Trail-Nuneaton

You can see my delinquent sunflower at Cream, Abbey Street, Nuneaton, until 28th September: https://www.facebook.com/TheCreamStore

Collecting 'graff' on my travels.

Ed helping me with painting.

 

*Solo One, our local superstar graffer living in London for the past 15 years, is the exception to this rule. He was in the local paper for his criminal offences. This actually had the opposite effect from the one the paper usually has, as his client list will tell you.