Shoreditch Street Art

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I have always known that Shoreditch was full of legal street art.  I have just never had a chance to get up close and photograph it before.  But as we decided we had done the London Coffee Festival on Sunday we went for a wander.  The threatened rain had held off and it was shaping up to be a gorgeous afternoon, and none of us wanted to be inside.

I have always loved graffiti, though I prefer to think of it as art rather than graffiti.  I love the vibrancy of it, that nobody really owns it, and that ultimately it could be gone tomorrow.   As we have seen with so much of Banksy’s work, a large number of them are fading, many of them have gone forever.   The fact you have to study it to sometimes see the message.  Or do you?  Are we trying too hard to sometimes see a message that isn’t there?  I love that these beautiful scenes and stunning attention to detail are often on walls with piles of rubbish up against them, or in the back of a dingy car park.

This is just a small selection of the pictures I took on Sunday afternoon as we wandered around Shoreditch and Brick Lane.

It’s hard to know if the barrels are part of the art work on this one, taken as I mentioned, in the back of a very dodgy looking car park.

This one did make me stop and think.  Why “to be continued” on somebody’s back?  Apparently under the skin?

It’s hard to believe that the light and shadow effects on this above are done with paint!  I stood and stared at this for about ten minutes.

Another one that has rubbish against it and that normally I would be trying to crop a picture to remove piles or rubbish but on this one, it absolutely has to stay.

Another one from the car park, again are the barrels and pile of wood anything to do with it?  Or will we go next week and find them cleared away?

This one above was shot through railings of a demolition site.  Just out of shot is a JCB.  I do hope these won’t be removed too, or hidden when the next block of million plus homes gets built.

There are lots of the circles with scenes from a film in them.  I loved this one of ET, really made me smile.

Another one that makes you look at the attention to detail, this bird head is stunning.   You can almost feel those downy feathers!

This is just a corner of a huge picture that filled a wall.  I would love to get something like this on a canvas.  I love the shapes, the lines, the colours.  All of it really.

And finally this lady, I thought was beautiful.  As you can see there is a car parked in front of her so I couldn’t get a great shot of her without getting more of the car.

But isn’t that the point?