Connected in Chaos

I set out on my afternoon walk today determined to find some real London street art. I did and I didn't.

I walked up Dufferin from our place, past the old London Life building. I tend to be blind to the local architecture, as I think most people are when they've lived so long in the same place, but this is one building that always arrests me. It's one of the city's few real gems. If I had to guess, I would have said it was built in the 1930s. Wrong! By about 60 years. It was built in 1874. 

Up around the corner on Wellington, I was struck by how forlorn the Presbyterian church on the corner looks. Another Covid Sunday. Churches are not doing well in the pandemic, I'm guessing. (See earlier remarks about being blind to the local architecture: this is also a pretty attractive structure.)

I was heading for a place I knew I'd find street art: King St. between Wellington and Waterloo. A couple of summers ago several artists were invited to paint murals on the pillars that hold up a raised walkway from the Hilton hotel on King to the Convention Centre, which fronts on York St. but backs onto King. I have photographed these pieces before but thought they showed up well in the winter light today. 

It's the juxtaposition of the vividly coloured paintings against the drab grey or brown backgrounds - made drabber by pale winter light. It makes the paintings really pop. (That said, I often noticed that the images Blogger puts inline with the text tend to look a little dull and muddy. Click on the pictures to enlarge them if you want to see something closer to what they're supposed to be like.)

I also wanted to finally check out the murals in the Richmond St. underpass. I had photographed one at the end of the series that is visible from the other side of the street where I was walking the other day, but I hadn't really understood what I was seeing. I assumed they were conventional painted wall murals. They're not. 

They're "digital murals," interesting collaborative efforts made as part of a broad-based community project titled Connected in Chaos. Individual sections of each panel started as conventional analog artworks, but were then "collaged" together digitally by the lead artist, Melanie Schambach, and reproduced on acrylic panels. The panels were sized to fit embrasures already existing in the design of the underpass. Project participants scraped and painted a colourful backdrop on the concrete.

Here are a few examples, along with the explanatory plaque at the Horton St. end of the underpass.

I think it's a very cool project, but in a way too bad it's stuck in this dingy underpass where not many pedestrians venture. 

The other thing that occurred to me is that neither this, nor the painted murals on King St. are really street art in the way we are accustomed to thinking of it from our sojourns in European cities. These are sanctioned, organized projects. Don't get me wrong, they're very welcome: they liven the place up. But they lack the transgressive element of art created by illegal paint-and-run artists. And, for the most part, they lack the insouciance and sly humour of many of the artists I've admired on the walls and hoardings in Valencia and Malaga in Spain and Montpellier in France.

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Every picture tells a story  So what does real street art look like? Something like this.

This is probably my favourite shot of street art taken in Valencia over five visits and dozens and dozens of photographs. I found the image down a tiny alleyway in the heart of the city - and I could never find it again on subsequent visits. It has everything: layers and layers of over painting, a well-executed central image (even if the guy's ears are weirdly low on his head in relation to the rest of his face,) incorporation of architectural elements (note there's a doorway in the middle of the picture), grottiness and - yeah, insouciance, humour.