Street art in North Street – oranges on a wire looking none too steady or healthy. The one on the right has gone a bit pear-shaped and appears to holding an ice-pack to its face. Or is it a mobile phone for oranges? Artist unknown (send e-mail or leave a comment). Next to a tag by Inkie.
Here is Faigy’s (Fb) finished piece, begun for CNB 2014, in William Street, just round the corner from Bellaire Hair & Beauty (Fb) in Royal Avenue (and opposite Hicks’s Lurid Wood from the previous year): one of Faigy’s wide-eyed beauties sports an extravagant pink hair-do. (Some of the jewels in the original version have been painted out.)
In Belfast, we like to get our kids started early with drawing in the street – see the gallery of images from Jacqueline Wylie’s CNB14 Rainbow Crossing – and one of them even took to the wall in North Street.
A sad Scotsman has been swallowed by a whale and is living in the belly of the beast along with an octopus, a little boy, and various other creatures. For CNB 2014 by Martina Scott, Drawn In Belfast, John McFarlane/Cosmic Bacon and others.
MTO (Fb) was in Belfast for Culture Night and painted a large piece entitled “Son of Protagoras”. The ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius reports that Protagoras was driven from Athens and his books burned because he wrote that it was impossible to know whether or not the gods existed. On Fb, MTO adds a description of the Northern Irish “peace” lines, perhaps suggesting that religious adherence continues to be an enemy of peace: in his painting, a dove has been pierced by arrows bearing the cross of the Knights of Malta and the Latin cross; or, as the wide shot below illustrates, the fences get in the way.
KVLR’s massive (four storey high) work for this past weekend’s Red Bull Music Academy live music festival, painted just prior to Culture Night Belfast 2014, shows a boy sitting serenely on a speaker listening with headphones to a single-reel tape player plugged into a flue on the side of the building. On his knitted hat is the logo of the British Phonograph Industry’s 1980’s campaign against cassette taping.
Here’s the second of two Emic (Fb | web) pieces done for CNB14: a male figure is engrossed in the music coming from his headphones. The location is the shutter of the Young Savage vintage clothing store on (upper) North Street, part of Bigg Life Arts/Cafe Wah! As can be seen in the wide shot of the Centre, below, Emic also did a piece two shutters down (the Inkie piece in between was featured in Art Lab); his other CNB14 piece is a little further north on the same street.
Street art from London-based artist Inkie (Fb), at the back of the Sunflower Bar, similar to Boogie Down Belfast but dedicated to the memory of a deceased friend, Sally Tutton.
Surf- and skate-boarder Tony Alva (web) is the subject of this Psychonautes (web | Fb) stencil in Garfield Street. In addition to another Tony Alva, Psychonautes has also done portraits of two other skateboarding legends – Steve Caballero and Rodney Mullen – in the Frenchman’s adopted hometown of Cork. Some idea of the method used can be gathered from this video of the production of a piece for a tapas restaurant in Dublin.