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.
Here’s the second set of entries that we’ve had for our graffiti competition. Have a look through and cast your vote for which artist’s work you think will look best in 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.
I’m based in London, and have been painting for last 15 years. I’ve been involved in Kevin Spacy’s exibition ”tunnel 228” , and organizing events like ”art against crime” and an up-comming event ” splashart session ”. I’ve exhibited work in Rarekind Gallery and many others. I’m well known for my amaizing 3d style. I’ve been inspired by 3 dimentional effects/letters and colourful background.
I am inspired by anything that is new and interesting but that still holds on to its roots and heritage in its genre artistically. My drive to paint comes from a simplistic love of spraypaint as a medium and seeing my name in big letters.
I am neither a street nor a graffitti artist. I only work with dulux paint and brushes… But i love to paint as big as possible in public spaces. The credit for most of my paintings over the last year goes out to the latino lands of Brasil and Argentina who welcomed me and my paintbrushes over the winter months. South america and its vibrancy will always influence my work…i owe it big time.. it has helped me find my creative path!! This is the main reason i feel i would be able to come up with something fantastic for Wahaca.
I am mainly inspired to paint portraits of those that inspire me, mainly in the field of music. I aim to for my art to be uplifting and celebrate culture in the world that enriches life and inspires people to take in interest in how people live in other parts of the world and help protect diversity in all its forms. I like to use both spraycans and traditional painting techniques to produce a striking design.
I began painting graffiti in 1987, i have developed my own surreal landscape mural style, I have a lot of experience working on interiors and exteriors. I live and work as an artist in east london recently spent 2 weeks in mexico i am inspired by birds in particular those of the Yucatan Peninsula.
My influences range from traditional 80s style subway graffiti to movements such as pop art and expressionism, enabling me to combine the vibrance of street graffiti with the aesthetics of more traditional contemporary art. Born in Latin America I have an affinity with the culture and would hope to use the theme of Latin music as an inspiration for the piece.
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.
We think that having all 50 submissions in one post would be too much, so we’re going to split them into 5 groups and post a new group up every day next week, starting on Bank Holiday Mondy. On Monday 7th September we will take the two submissions that recorded the most votes from each group and put it to the team.
We want to know what you think, so remember to come back and vote for all of the groups!
Calling all Street Artists: Enter our competition for your chance to leave your mark at Canary Wharf, and win £4000 in the process.
Wall art by Oliver Shaw
We’re looking for a Graffiti/ Street artist to fill a huge space (over 28m2) in our new site in Canary Wharf, opening October 2009. Both street artists Oliver Shaw and Nuria, whose work was exhibited at the Tate Modern last year have worked with Wahaca in the past and we are looking for an equally exciting artist to take over our site and leave their mark.
Wahaca commissions site-specific pieces focusing on street and environmental art and is willing to pay up to £4,000 for this next commission (excluding materials).
How do I get involved??
We need to see a piece of your work that shows how you think your style would fit with Wahaca. If you want to see the previous commissions, visit our site in Covent Garden (66 Chandos Place, WC2N 4HG) or White City (Westfield, Southern Terrace, W12 7GB) to get a feel for what Wahaca is about.
We will post all the entries onto the blog and ask readers to judge their favourite. All entries must be submitted by the 23rd August and a winner will be announced at the beginning of September. Site visits of the new Canary Wharf Wahaca can then be arranged with installation expected mid October. The artists work will also feature in our Wahaca paper OLA London of which 30,000 are printed and distributed as well as appear in materials/ websites associated with the competition and Wahaca.
To enter email loswahacos@wahaca.co.uk with a picture of your work that best describes your style and please attach in no more than a 100 words an overview of what inspires you as well as any website or further useful information about you. If you have further questions please call Mark on 07748148323.
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