Richard Hambleton

"Richard Hambleton has been called the godfather of street art. He began producing what he called ‘public art’ in New York City in the 1970s.He’s known for the black figures he first painted on the buildings of New York’s Lower East Side, which he called Shadowmen. The Shadowmen arrived in the early 1980s, and shocked many a denizen of that city who walked the streets at night. In 1981 and 1982 he populated the Lower East Side with these unnerving figures.A reclusive man, physically gaunt (somewhat creepy-looking himself), Hambleton had undertaken work of a similar bent before. In his Mass Murder project in the late 1970s, he drew crime-scene outlines of dead bodies on the street and had volunteers play homicide victims. Passersby mistook the installations for the aftermaths of real murders.Both these projects spoke to the zeitgeist, as US urban crime panics shook the nation in those decades. The Shadow men would shock passersby, who often mistook them for shadows of real people, possible assailants. Many people who lived in NYC around that time have stories of the moment they were petrified by a Shadowman and these stories seem to be almost a badge of honour top the artist with a distinctly morbid streak. For Hambleton audience reaction was integral to the artwork itself.He said:“Other artists put their work on the city, but what I paint on the walls is only part of the picture. The city psychologically completes the rest. People experience my paintings. They aren’t simply exposed to them.”His art was apparently inspired by the shadows left on the sides of buildings by victims of the atomic blast on Hiroshima. In an age of Cold War anxiety, perhaps his work pointed at the way people’s lives seemed to rest on a knife edge.The Shadowmen drew in other urban artists, who daubed over the black figures with their own work. Indeed, Hambleton was not a lone wolf. With Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, he was one of a legendary trio of New York artists at the forefront of the street art boom. The three regularly met to discuss their work with one another, and sometimes collaborated.His work began to pop up all over the globe. Shadowmen even appeared on the Berlin Wall in 1984, when he painted 17 life-size figures on its eastern side. His Shadowman paintings have been documented by photographer Hank O’Neal."(artpie.co.uk)

Street art Buenos Aires - Ever

Ever (real name Nicolás Romero), is a street art artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ever has been commissioned for works in Miami's Wynwood Walls street art district, and to paint a parking garage wall on Atlanta's Second Avenue as part of the Living Walls conference.
Ever began painting graffiti on his city's streets in the 1990s, starting with letter-based works. Since then, his work has evolved towards portraits of people, which Ever claimed is due to the influence of Gustav Klimt, Francis Bacon and Vincent van Gogh. Ever's preference is to paint ordinary people, based on photos he finds on the Internet, or people he sees on the streets, or simply his own brother. The "painterly" style of portraits is more typical of paintings found in a gallery than in street art. Ever uses both aerosol and brush-based techniques in his work.Wikipedia

 

Street art - graffiti - C215 - Christian Guémy

"Born in 1973 as Christian Guémy, the Paris-based French street artist known as C215 has swiftly moved in to being one of the top stencil artists in the world. He is considered one of the top veterans still in the game, with his moniker derived from a prison cell in which he was once locked away.
C215 has been creating street art for about 20 years. He paints, draws, and makes stencils, and he truly enjoys painting in the streets. The stencils make it possible to paint beautiful street art portraits in unauthorized locations. They are often enhanced through the use of graffiti markers. C215 also began using spray painting techniques in 2005. He believes that graffiti is focusing on a name by marking a territory and street art is placing art in the perfect location.
His entire focus lies on creating portraits for individuals such as elders, beggar children, refugees and others is based on the desire to present and draw attention to those we often forget to recognize in life. Often, he finds inspiration by focusing on face portraits of random people he meets in public.
These individuals, those society prefers to hide, need recognition as much as those we see every day. C215 tries to interact with context, which is the reason he places his artistic elements and portraits in the streets. To C215, the most important parts of the stencil are the feelings within, the expression of the eyes, and the story behind.

 Regarding his work, C215 states, “In the end, behind the portraits, the question is always freedom and dignity in the face of a capitalist daily life system.” He believes that “urban art” is simply the sharing of artwork with others against gentrifications and standardization. Putting life in the streets through art is also part of adding to the aesthetic of the everyday.
Each of his stencils has their own story, and most of them come from his very own pictures. His primary medium for art is stencil graffiti or street art. In fact, his collection of works is so massive primarily because he cuts stencils and paints almost every day.
Not only is C215 a master of his art, but the French artist also executes a variety of different media art and installations such as wood and canvas. C215 murals and stencils can be seen throughout the Internet as a very popular street art search trend.

Overall, there is little match to the unique style presented like C215 murals and stencils, as C215 is one of the greatest stencil artists ever known.
Christian Guémy enjoys listening to people pronounce his street art moniker in different languages. It is also interesting to note that C215 writes and publishes poetry, which is never included in his stencils or murals.
The best part about C215’s job, in his opinion, is that he creates what he truly loves: his artwork. C215 doesn’t have to worry about working a traditional job under a boss. He also believes that one should never follow anyone, nor copy others. They should simply follow their own style and feeling.
An artist with worldwide acclaim, some of the cities where C215’s work has been created, painted, and/or displayed include New Delhi, London, Istanbul, Fes, Rome, and Paris and in countries such as Brazil, Poland, Israel, and Morocco."(streetartbio.com/c215)

Street Art Pablo Delgado

Pablo Delgado is a Mexico-born London-based street artist that emerged in 2011 to quickly became a well-known London street artists. Since 2012 he has been decorating East London's street corners with his inventive and humorous miniatures
His early work consisted of miniature doorways pasted up on the edges of walls. Soon, Pablo began expanding into detailed narratives, meticulously depicting hosts of people, animals and objects in minutia around London.
His style involves taking imagery from mass media or popular culture, stripping it of colour then arranging the tiny figures into surreal scenes and compositions. His style is peculiarly known for the distinctive black shadows cast on the pavement that give a lifelike quality to his work and make them pop off the surface. The scenes themselves appear fantastical, chaotic and seemingly unrelated, but each contain their own narratives and stories that, with the locations, are carefully chosen in order to contribute to the story.In December 2012, Pablo Delgado painted the Village Underground wall in Shoreditch, London.Wikipedia

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