Dublin-based South African street artist MarcaMix (pictured below) was in Belfast for CNB15 in September and painted this colourful mural in Garfield Street. The circular swirl was originally larger and looked like a sun, so I see steam rising off icy fields. Or a chemistry experiment gone gloriously wrong. Other interpretations are welcome in the comments!
ADW‘s (Fb) CNB15 ‘combat helmet of crayons’ piece in Garfield Street has already been reclaimed by the Belfast graffitists (specifically NOTA), cheekily turning ‘born to create’ into ‘born 2 destroy’, rather like the ‘born to kill’ from the poster for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, on which the work was based (final image, below).
The piece above by Malarky (aka Malarko) for CNB15 in September was replaced in short order by the RAZER tag (and face), below.
The wide shot shows the other pieces in the North Street car park: Femme Fatale by Mels from HTN/CNB15 and Fight Or Flight by Friz and Danleo from CNB13.
Malarky also did the piece immediately below in the lower Kent Street car-park.
Braddell & Sons sell fishing equipment in North Street and this year for CNB15 their shutters got the Elph treatment: a boy sits fishing in a mind-melting landscape. The little fish named “Fish” on the left (in the wide shot below) is for a guy who used to play the arcades further up the street. (Fb)
L.A. artist StarFighterA (Chirstina Angelina) was in Belfast for CNB15 and painted this three-headed, four-storey, piece of street art on the side-wall of the Irish News’s offices in Donegall Street. A full shot and another close-up are below.
Street art is often vandalised (see: the whole of Cupar Way and also A Short Treatise On The Ephemerality Of Art in which NIKO destroyed Praise’s CNB12 piece) but rarely is the vandal a commercial company drumming up business.
In a first for Belfast murals, speech balloons have been added to the Ring Of Peace mural in Waring Street to advertise office space. They read “Forget it, Muriel. I’m moving my business to CQHQ without you!” “Oh Jeff … It’s too close to the City Centre! I want to be with nature …”. We hope that indeed the ad does move away from the “muriel” – the balloons appear to be pasted over the mural, rather than painted on.
The speech-balloons are in fact an improvement over the earlier complete covering of the mural (paperjamdesign). In a less successful part of its media strategy, the business’s web site, at cqhqbelfast.com, appears to be non-functioning.
Report and video on the corporate vandalism from BBC-NI.