STREET ART EXPLOSION
LAND & LIBERTY - FAITH 47
It’s quite intriguing how graffiti and street art in the last few months literally exploded onto the scene in South Africa. I’ve been photographing and writing about this form of outsider art for close on two years now and all of a sudden virtually every décor or fashion magazine carries an article or some street art images.
The February issue of Elle Decoration in their Deco News features a spread titled “Street Smart - Step into the street that’s bold, vibrant and urban conscious” This includes images of the work of Faith47’s beautiful “Land and Liberty” and Ricky Lee Gordon aka as Freddie Sam of Write on Africa as well as the De La Rey Street subway artworks that Joburg Photowalkers visited on the walk on the 4th of January.
The Citizen newspaper also carried an article on The Odd Café earlier in the week -Christina Patricios and her husband Oresti had the vision and street smarts to commission Mars and his crew to turn the façade of a drab building into a work of art. I popped in just after they opened in September last year shooting some photographs of this quirky place. One of these was used by the paper although the paper credited all three of to me, sorry Oresti and whoever took the other one.
BEAUTIFIED BUILDING
16 January 2011 | NATALIE BOSMAN
Four artists, a few days of hard graft on scaffolding, 100 or so spray cans later and Greenside’s Odd Café now boasts a funky three-storey high graffiti mural to match the quirky coffee bar, gallery and restaurant’s arty interior.
If the messages “life’s delicious”, “be different” and “be yourself” scrawled in bold, puffy pink letters on the building’s exterior were designed to attract attention to one of Greenside’s newest kids on the restaurant block, then mission accomplished.
But owner and founder Christina Patricios has a somewhat bigger picture in mind.
“We love design and art forms that intersect with popular culture and invested a considerable amount of money in creating a mural that covers the building Odd Café is housed in,” she explains.
“We believe this will inject local culture into Greenside and could help people become more appreciative of graffiti as an art form.”
“Just as Newtown is being beautified by street art, we wanted to bring colour, debate and visual entertainment to Greenside.”The talent responsible for the turquoise and pink masterpiece is graffiti artist Mars and the guys from the DS Crew.
Chatting about the inspiration and brainstorming behind the artwork, Mars is quick to say that this facade was without a doubt one of the most rewarding and creatively satisfying jobs he has done to date.
“We pretty much had an open brief, which more often than not makes for the best artworks.”
Starting with an initial brainstorming session, followed by sketches and thorough planning and spacing of each of the three balconies and then plotting the colours on a computer, Mars and the DS Crew were ready to set up their scaffolding and start freehand transferral of their ideas from paper to plaster.
Although all of the graffiti artists had done artworks of a similar length before, working at a height of three storey’s (and having to painstakingly climb up and down and view their progress from across the street each time they started a new section) was a new and exciting experience altogether.
“By giving us such an open brief, I guess they took a risk with us,” Mars laughs, “but I’d say it worked out very well for both parties.”