When I saw this piece recently, on a wall by a canal near Victoria Park in East London, it certainly stood out. Nestled among the usual pile up of signatures and tags, the wood for the trees of graffiti – it stood out immediately. So striking with it’s three colours and the beautifully striated striping of the tiger, the strength of its’ detail along with that finely arrayed ground detail with semblance of shadows beneath slender paws. Of course the cub is the kicker here, it is a mother Tiger moving her cub and looking back, watchful for the approach of danger. I took this with my mobile/cell phone from a bridge over the canal and returned the next day with my camera only to see someone had just finished painting over it with a bog standard tag. I’m afraid I couldn’t balance my sense of loss and made a wry comment to the artist as to what he had covered over with what. Not my finest moment – forgetting momentarily the very impermanent reality upon which graffiti is writ and its’ innate acceptance of that fact. As such it was good to have caught the tiger when the chance had arisen.
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There’s something of the tiny soot lifeforms in Hayo Miyazaki’s Spirited Away at work here. This artist’s work adorns many spots around east London, nooks and crannies of concrete. This spot near St. James Street station in Walthamstow is on a modern estate and caught me by surprise. I was meeting a friend for a walk in Epping Forest and had some time before my train came, so took off with my camera down an alleyway I had never explored and came across this in the middle of a modern housing development, otherwise signalling the trend in British home construction of the last 40 years of creating more or less identikit orange estates.
It strikes me that places like this, usually lacking any kind of achitectural character – need as much visual and cultural intervention as possible. As such, the silhouette of a girl apparently feeding or tending an anomalous’living’ ink spot strikes a correct chord for me.
In his anime works Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have given us some fine protagonists in the form of young girls expressing an elevated character of spirit and empathy, Chihiro in Spirited Away for example and of course the most extraordinarily incisive and wild such presence, allied with magical wolves; Princess Mononoke. While a reactionary backlash has greeted modern studio system’s interest in gender swapping lead roles and characters, the fact remains that in these stories (when done well), we get the chance to experience agency and intensity that has tranditionally been narratively shaded. The mode of human beings in becoming with the female and especially augmented by the more open flexibility and capacity of youth.
While writing this, I had a reminder of a most extraordinary rendition as to this sense of young women and anomalous potential via coming across the 90’s Slowdive track ‘When The Sun Hits’ which has been put to the visuals of Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic At Hanging Rock. The film tells the story of a small group of school girls being educated at a boarding school in early 1900’s Australia. On a school trip to the mysterious local landmark of the title, some of the girls leave the group and ascend the rock itself, apparently cross a threshold of being and disappearing while doing so. Alerted by a strange premonition, they are joined at the last minute by their older teacher Miss McCraw, who is also then part of the disappearance.
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Here’s another character, the ilk of which is again well distributed in East London. This one in particular though I found charming and well positioned. London often does micro-woodland quite well. This path runs along a flank of the Wick Woods in East London, near Hackney Wick, where for many years an alternative community of artists lived, before the area was prioritised for redevelopment.
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The instant I saw this, walking a few weeks ago on a wet Cardiff morning in late December, I was momentarily transfixed. The obvious action element to my eye was the shape of the bird from dripping paint on the slabs of pavement. Weirdly adorned and emphasised with feather-like wingtips from where part of a pine leaf had fallen and now lay glistening like everything else. In colour, a bird becoming-sky, in a smooth space between – and while the trail traverses – a very human application of base geometry. In delineatory narrative terms, I also enjoy how it is a transit from a striated, turbulent looking space into the adjacent smoothness, while the segmentary prominence remains.
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Humour and style, elevation of the functional and ubiquitous installation. From there it manages to do at least three wonderful things. It blends the object with its surroundings, giving us an aspect towards 3D street painting, it also renders with some empathy and technical prowess – a much loved animal, while simultaneously reminding that this mode of the meerkat is actually about wariness in the terrain. in this respect it serves as the most subtle and gentle of warnings. That these streets are worthy of awareness, alertness and guard. This photo could easily have been cropped (16mm is tall when it comes to portrait) but actually I felt the setting was more helpful within that without on this occasion.
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This feels like one of those confluential moments to have struck me and the camera.
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Coming from Hackney/Walthamstow Marshes towards Walthamstow, you might come across this house with it’s vivid mural that seems to be calling upon both pop-art in its colouring style while possibly referencing Picasso with some of its intermeshing of form and the meaning of recognisable, transected features. It’s refreshing to come across things like this, so out of keeping with how much of our conurbation looks.
As a whole, this mural is a congested space which offers some relief with its rhythm and its striking and contrasted pallete. There is only a little space comparatively for its sky – while its upper layer is composed primarily of the features of faciality, before in its deeper areas it becomes more abstract in line and form with inter-plexed suggestion of character and feature of a less obviously human reference.
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reflectivewavelengths 