A chance encounter with an artist

I’m sorry I’ve been a bit quiet on here of late, but I’ve been so busy with Japan related stuff on Haikugirl’s Japan and egg hunting on Picturing England.

Today I had the day off and ended up down the Southbank. It was a glorious day, and something incredibly cool happened. I always stop by the skate park when I’m walking past so I can see the latest graffiti and street art. I have become quite the graffiti hunter over the last few months, and love to find new pieces by my favourite artists. A lot of people think graffiti is just vandalism, but it’s not. I agree that some tagging can just look messy, but have you seen some of the art on the streets of London? Some of it is really incredible.

One of my favourite street artists is Paul DON Smith, and today I was lucky enough to run into him while he was producing a brand new piece of work.

DON’s work, along with a small collection of other street artists, is what I would call “real art”. His work, quite often portraits, is beautiful and full of so much detail. The piece I saw him painting today took about an hour and a half, which I never would have imagined. You always think of graffiti as being something fast, not something which consists of layers and layers of paint applied using different shades of spray paint and different stencils. Details are added in with marker pens and tipex, and it’s so much more than just writing your name on a wall.

Once I realised I was watching DON at work, I had to stick around to the end. The finishing touch was a stencil of the words “queen saved the God”.

When I spoke to DON, he seemed particularly proud of this little twist. He said he’d been thinking about the Queen and religion, and wondering if people in the UK were losing their faith. He said this was a “thinky piece” and it is. I love how he’s used an image of the famous Michelangelo piece and turned it into a comment on the state of religion in the uk.

I spoke to Don briefly after he finished his new piece, and asked him how he could get away with working in broad daylight. He said that it was ok on this particular part of the Southbank (there were two other artists working at the time), and that he usually worked during the day and didn’t “give a fuck” about getting caught. He was off to Shoreditch to paint the same piece there, too, and happily posed for a photo before leaving.

Interestingly, DON seemed keen to get his work in a gallery, but I personally think the streets of London are a better gallery for his work than any four walls could be.

Keep an eye out for Don’s work around London. There’s a lot down at the Southbank skate park, and around Shoreditch, although they do tend to get painted over quite quickly. One you’ll see a lot is his money man – a banker who is just letting all the money run down the drain.

Here are some other pieces by Don, which I think you’ll agree are much more than mindless vandalism.