Street Art

The reason I love Fab's class (and yes, our professors name is Fab) is because she takes us on cool excursions like taking a tour of the street art around Shoreditch, which is my favorite area in London. You know, it's all young, hip, open-minded kids, or so it seems. What I loved about this particular class is that it brought me back to being a senior in high school and basically having my only homework be art for AP. Now, I SUCKED in the beginning of senior year. Like, embarrassingly sucked (does that even make sense?) But gradually and with a LOT of practice I grew to really understand that it's not the basic colors you would think should be used or even just one medium to create a great piece of artwork. 

I'm still not the best and I am still learning and taking my time with getting better at art, but that part of my life has been on a standstill since senior year. Luckily, last year for my 20th birthday, my parents went balls to the walls and bought me an easel, a ton of canvases and plenty of paint, charcoal, drawing pencils and sketchbooks. I truly didn't even know where to start. 

Portraits are my favorite so I slowly started to look up images to try to copy them to get the feel again of drawing faces. I currently have a half painted Quabs (if you don't know who that is, shame on you. but she's my roommate) on a canvas and ever since this class I've been itching to get back to work on it. 

Our tour guide was Ben Slow, a street artist who actually made the Charlie Burns portrait pictured below. Incredible! I was automatically drawn to it. I think there is something so fascinating about portraits because even the slightest wrong mark will throw off the whole face and make it look like no one you intended it to look like. Very tough, and I am the farthest away from mastering it but one day it would be great thing to accomplish such a realistic portrait piece. 

Ben was talking about how the skyscrapers and modern buildings are taking over and it's a shame because most of these artists created masterpieces around the city for no money at all, which took intense work. It's truly sad to see these street art pieces being torn down for new buildings. He also mentioned how London is getting even more ridiculously expensive (what else is new) and these artists, who work for no money, can't afford to live in a city like that so they are moving elsewhere and street art isn't being made as frequently as it used to be now. There will be no life to the city if it keeps up with the tall, grey buildings and having prices sky rocket. A shame. 

We even got to see an artist at work, who is Ben's friend. It seemed to me like they all knew each other. They were talking about getting drinks later at the pub and they're life at that moment seemed awesome to me. You know, just painting murals on buildings and then meeting up for drinks when done. Ugh.

But anyways, just thought I'd share some cool pictures of what street art is like in London (unreal).