You might have heard the news about the opening of our brand spanking new cocktail and Mezcal bar in Canary Wharf which is already serving a fantastic range of tongue tingling cocktails to the good people of Canada Square. You might even have read our post with a little background information about the “Elixir of the Gods” that is Mezcal. But we thought we’d share this beautiful film produced by the Oaxaca State Government, which brings to life all of the passion that has been bottled up in the production of this mysterious spirit for generations.
We’re always keen to hear from you, so please let us know if you have any Mezcal stories, or any favourite Mezcal cocktails by commenting below.
We’ve had a great response to Tommi’s request for your Mexican recipes to go into her new book, Mexican Food Made Simple, and we are now closed for entries.
We’ve spent the last month collecting together your wild, wonderful and occasionally mind blowing recipe suggestions, so there’s lots of deliberation, cogitation and digestion to be done before we make our final choice of whose recipe will be published for the world see.
Watch this space for more from the British Chilli Revolution soon.
The British Museum opens the doors on September 24th for its final exhibition in the series on great leaders with an exhibition on Moctezuma the Aztec Ruler. For more information on the exhibition check out OLA London coming out in October with an interview between Ignacio Duran (cultural minister for Mexico in UK) and Colin McEwan (the curator).
Wahaca is really excited to be part of it with Tommi (our Executive chef) holding a demonstration and introduction to Mexican cooking, as well as a discussion with Fay Maschler of the Evening Standard.
For more information on the talk on Mexican food with Tommi and Fay Maschler click here and for Tommi’s demonstration and introduction to Mexican food on the 28th November click here.
Wahaca customers also get a £2 discount off their tickets – pick up a card in one of our restaurants which will explain how to redeem this (subject to availability).
Tickets are on sale – visit the British Museum’s website at www.britishmuseum.org or call the ticket line on +44 (0)20 7323 8181.
We’ve been delighted with the amount of votes so far. Please keep up the good work! Here’s the 4th heat in the contest, so please have a look and let us know who you think would be best to decorate our new restaurant in Canary Wharf. There will be a final set of artists uploaded tomorrow, so keep checking back to have your say on who goes into the final 10, from which 1 lucky winner will be chosen by the Wahaca Team.
25. Brian Masters
As a boy, I said to my father I want to be a painter. What I meant was an artist, but father got me a job as a painter/decorator. My true passion though is to create art. I am inspired to capture the essences of people’s souls and have developed my own style which some might describe as flamboyant. I am completely self-taught. My vision for the walls of Wahaca would be to showcase the passionate people of Mexico – eating, dancing, cooking in the markets and the streets – all thoroughly enjoying life to create a feeling of warmth and wellbeing.
I was basically sick to death of walking around and seeing so many boarded up houses which i felt were an eye sore and in some ways depressing so i decided to tackle this by bringing life back to those houses with a mix of street art and photography. I would describe my work as environmental activism!
27. Miss Bonnita
I believe that my art is perfect for Wahaca!!
I am a experienced street artist and I also have the skills and experience as i have worked with interior decorators on massive hand painted wall installations.. No space is too big.
I am also passionate about colour and design. I believe that public art has a responsibility to lift the soul and create a sense of happiness and in return vibrate that energy towards the viewer so that they can feeling positively enhanced.
I’m a qualified French artist from Paris and i’ve been painting on the wall since 90’s. My style is a mixture of street art, aerosol bombs, stencils and collages. I also paint canvases for a gallery in Paris. My influcenes are the fashion, electronic music, contemporay art and a lot of streets artists and graphists (Blek, Futura, José Parla, Kaws, Brainwash, Faile, Beejoir, Invader, Obey, M/M, Mode 2, Frost, Jr, Micallef and Banksy). I am the creator of the french brand MS Wear (graphic tee shirts, www.mswear.fr <blocked::http://www.mswear.fr/> ) and i’m the artisitic director of the shop Ministry Of Design Paris. I like to mix the pastels colours with the flashy. I think art is a color in the life. The Street art is The Life !
I work as a textile visual artist in London, basically I draw words and images with different materials and textile fabrics, sometimes I embroider on my art. I am very much influenced by pop art, street art and equally traditional craft art in the world, and also poetry writing is a huge part in my creative process.
Claroscuro is a duo of two artists. One coming from a background of fine arts and the other with a background in Graffiti. The symbiosis of these two mediums is created with the objective of using art as a social and communicative tool. Claroscuro has left murals and posters around Europe as well as participating in gallery shows and exhibiting in Barcelona London and New York. Claroscuro would be honored to get busy on the commission for wahaca and would prepare something freeessshhh.”
I like the idea of a square comprising lots of rectangles and a circle where people put their clothes in. I also like the idea of a woman swimming in purple, jelly-like liquid that could smell of flowers and sugar, and that is just another product on the shelf of the off license. One thing becomes another that refers to something else that had nothing to do with it. This big play with reality is what I’m interested in.
We were watching Jamie’s fantastic new show on Channel 4 last night where he travelled around the Mexican “barrio’s” of southern California. He was talking about our favourite subject – Mexican food!
Some of the recipes he explored looked fantastic, especially the mexican salads, the mole and the cactus…
But he did make one little mistake, he said you couldn’t get anything like it in the UK….!
Those of you that have been to Wahaca will know our Mexican salads full of radishes, hibiscus flowers, ancho chillies, mint and pumpkin seeds, and our delicious Chicken mole enchilada, not to mention the Cactus Tostadsas!
Jamie we’d love to invite you down to try all these and hope you will see that proper Mexican food is alive and well in the UK
Thanks to everyone who’s voted already, we’ve had a great response to our first two heats. Here’s the third set of entries that we’ve had for our graffiti competition. Have a look through and let us know whose work you think would be best for our new Canary Wharf restaurant. Don’t forget to keep checking back every day this week, as we’ll be posting another set of artists work each day for you to chose from.
Irony has a true talent for creeping around in the dark putting up pictures where people didn’t expect them. For him this is a good enough reason to dedicate every waking hour to that end. Embracing traditional letter graffiti concepts as well as stencil art Irony’s work is a mish-mash of visual ideas boiled down into something small enough to carry on the night bus without looking suspicious. Most notable are his beautiful paintings of woman and angels in gothic dresses and television creatures which while very pretty, have a strong anti-authoritarian air about them.
letters, colours, stamps, food, music, women, markers, spaces, walls, rough surfaces, the see, good weather, spraypaint, coffee, beer, travelling, singing, whistling, hanging out tuff, rough or just easy, laughing, working, paddeling, salat making, meet roasting, television, spitting, rap, whitest boy alive, notorious big, falling asleep, being loud, dreaming, fence climbing, whale watching, photography, ocean, annapurna, dogs n’ cats, ghosts, heavy metal, fishing, surfing, reading books, riding horses, painting trains, sleeping in trains, subways, pattern, buildings, trees, wind, forms, darth vader, instant soups, ants, flies to feed the ants, beat street, hands, lips, words, fonts, stealing ideas from the internet, listening to people in the subway, talking, tequila, well curated exhibitions, a good nap, the right ingredients for a meal, spontaneousness…
My work is inspired by energy, colour, punk, traveling, old wood cuts, aboriginal art, unity, countryside, collaboration, bold, crowds, upbeat, flow, graffiti, nature, cultures, outsider art and development.
FifteenFrames is the shared paths of street artists Crack15 and Frame. Different origins and stories in over 15 years in business up against the wall. Name a style, we master it: photorealism, abstract, 2D, 3D, throw it at us.
22. Zara
I like experiment with my art work and doodles often drawing things that take my current interest rather than sticking to one theme. I find myself lately creating very organic illustrations using a few colours and clean lines. I love skateboard and surf board graphics and am currently working on designs for skateboards in the near future. I do love painting and think being able to work on a large wall sounds like great fun.
Everyday life inspires me… I prefer to put my own twist on social situations, this makes daily life alot more interesting, it makes life simpler and it helps me grasp subjects I don’t usually like to confront.
The things that inspire me as an artist are the little things in every day life, from a crack in the wall that to anybody else is “a crack in the wall” but I can see a whole world of other things, to seing a child drawing from his mind,and not thinking about the meaning behind it. This is still how I like to paint/draw and not thinking about consequences , as this holds people back too much. Without these things for me there is no point in drawing.
Now you’ve seen all the entries, cast your vote on which you think would look best in Wahaca Canary Wharf. You can only vote once on each heat, so be careful who you chose and look out for the next set of entries over the next few days.
Wow – we’ve had so many fantastic entries to our graffiti competition that we’re going to have to spread voting over an entire week! Each day we will post 10 entries and at the end of the week the top 2 from each post will go through to the final judgment by our management team.
Here are the first 10 entries, but remember to keep looking back and voting every day this week.
I am a Mexican who has been living here for 6 years, creating cross-cultural multi-disciplinary art. I am always drawn to the images that our cities hold and the stories behind them; from finding an old woman sewing a hat for Semana Santa while taking the sun in a small street in Seville, to the cherry blossoms on Hackney Road during the arrival of Springtime, or the busy commuters in Euston train station struggling with each other on the hottest day of London’s summer.
Artistic mark making and its creation is the most natural and intuitive instinct that I have at my disposal. Drawing inspirations from both rural & urban environments, I attempt to project into spaces, the techno-organic free flowing formations of curvaceous-linear marks that are prominent within nature.
I then endeavour to offset this with the surrounding metropolitan/industrial landscape. This is conveyed by a format of biomechanical, angle-poised geometric shapes.
My aim is to balance these contrasting factions showing the intricate qualities both environments have to offer, colliding into
a free-style colourfull abstract final outcome. Hopefully unaffected by any preconceived notions the viewer may have.
Influential Artists Include: H.R Geiger, M.C Escher, Salvador Dali, Roger Dean, Francis Bacon, Wes Wilson, Mucha & Andy Warhol.
+Graffiti Artists: Craola, 0ly Bleach, 0.Two, Seak, Seen, D*Face, Jeremy Fish, Alexone, Fybeone and Das Mudwig.”
i much prefer painting large spaces. big is best :] i like the idea of my characters invading, populating and taking over spaces. i am inspired by comics, cartoons and toys. by the 80s, bright colours and kitch. by tattoo art and by everyday life. i try to not let life get in the way of drawing daily..
Last year I painted a large wall piece. Moving away from the canvas was very liberating and now that my big show is over I plan on painting much more on walls and getting away from the comfort of my studio. I actually spent a year in Oaxaca after graduating from university. It was there that I began painting full-time, studying in the La Universidad de Bellas Artes.
I have been going to Mexico all my life because two of my siblings were brought up there. I also have a Mexican uncle and Mexican cousins on my mother’s side. I feel a very strong connection to that country, specifically Oaxaca of course, the arts capital of Mexico. I think the Latino influence is quite obvious in my paintings and South American people always comment on it.
His work is a mixture of organic images / patterns , art influences , graffiti / street art and computer design where the name comes from .(#c0defc is code for a colour in hexadecimal cyfers coming from his tag “ code “ and his initials FC )
The painting often escapes the usual square boundary of a canvass to be applied on to everyday objects found in skips sometimes left abandoned using concrete / silicon , installed in places as ” illegal public art “/ “performances” as if the whole process was more an activity to transform society’s waste into art using public spaces as galleries.
His graffiti / street art work is now mostly based on specific projects usually carried out in different countries mixing the site specific characteristic with recurrent subjects mostly based on cinematic symbols describing the artist background.
After a decade of active graffiti writing and global exploration my work has become strongly site specific.
I treat each location differently. I choose a design that harnesses the potential I see in each space. I enjoy tongue in cheek transformation. Turning things upside down, I put them on their head. By breaking down barriers through simply iconography I am accessible to the masses. I change peoples perception of the world around them. My humour is sophisticated, yet playful. There is lots to absorb, while being bold and simply pleasing to the eye. Lets make sweet music.
To understand a bit about Pure Evil it is illuminating to know that he is a descendant of Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor who wrote the controversial work Utopia and who was later beheaded by King Henry VIII. With this busy background (Sir Thomas was later canonised) it is only natural that Pure Evil should explore the darker side of the wreckage of Utopian dreams and the myth of the Apocalypse, a belief in the life-changing event that brings history with all its conflicts to an end.
In 1990 PURE EVIL left the Poll Tax Riots of London behind and went to live in California where he spent 10 years ingesting weapons grade psychedelics , thinking about stuff , making electronic music and printing t-shirts . Inspired by skateboard culture and the west coast character graffiti of Twist he returned to London and picked up a spraycan and started painting weird fanged vampire bunnies everywhere.
8. Infected By Design
Because of my OCD and an over-active imagination, my artwork comes out in many different forms, but is always the result of having to get every line painstakingly neat! I take inspiration from everything around me, yet at the same time, it’s almost like sometimes I don’t want to take in anything from the world outside, lest it should influence my art, which I try to create purely from my mind. I would love this opportunity to show the world what it means to be ‘Infected By Design’.
To be the best ‘me’ I can be is what causes my inspiration as an artist because it keeps my eyes and mind open, aware of myself, aware of others, aware of the possibility of art, and aware of the essential combination which is life itself. Life and art are inseparable and I’d like to share my experience of this cohesion with the world in a positive and unifying way.
10. Emiliano Mendieta-Band
I’m what we call a brit-mex, that is half british half mexican, and my work goes around this mixed identity, my life experiences and the places I’ve lived in. I was born close to the day of the death and this has been one of the main subjects of my work, death as a source of life and a connection with your past, the story that makes you who you are. I look forward using the space as something that creates an atmosphere rather than just using the wall as a flat surface, floors and roofs can be used as well as the use of papel picado to create something more interesting, something that embraces you rather than something flat on the wall.
Now you’ve seen all the entries, cast your vote on which you think would look best in Wahaca Canary Wharf. You can only vote once on each heat, so be careful who you chose and look out for the next set of entries over the next few days.
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