Joyeux Nouvel An! Happy New Year!

To all my readers and all my family and friends and to everyone who just chances on this blog!

And my new year's resolution is:

Try and write more posts! (Notice I said 'try')

An interesting snippet from New York Times

Many of the new art hotels are springing up in the Boulevard Montparnasse area on the Left Bank. During the 1920s, you might have found Picasso drinking at the Café Select, Ferdinand Leger painting in the La Ruche studio complex or Man Ray holing up at the Hôtel Istria. Today, the small lanes around Place Pablo Picasso — famous for Rodin’s statue of Balzac — hide newfangled art havens like the Hôtel des Académies et des Arts.
Its pedigree is impressive. According to Henry Mona, the hotel’s director, the building once housed the studio of the celebrated Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita, a friend and colleague of Picasso and Man Ray, and the street was at one time home to Modigliani.
Paying tribute to the spirit of the avant-garde, the hotel hired the French urban artist Jérôme Mesnager, who has gained fame for painting his signature “white bodies” — sinewy humanoid forms — on city walls from Togo to Tokyo, including the Great Wall of China and Red Square in Moscow.
Mr. Mesnager has installed the spectral creatures in each of the boutique hotel’s 20 rooms, on the building’s facade, in the courtyard, on the wall of the lobby (chock full of books about Montparnasse’s artistic heyday) and even the elevator shaft (visible through a glass wall in the elevator).
“They’re the hotel’s permanent guests,” Mr. Mona joked.

(from New York Times, Dec 18 2009)

Nemo's new work in Belleville

This month saw a most exciting happening: a new Nemo fresco created by the artist on the wall of a 7-storey apartment block at 146 Rue de Menilmontant, looking over the Menilmontant-Oberkampf crossroads. It features all his most loved elements: the man in the black raincoat with his suitcase, the red balloon(inspired of course by Lamorisse's film of the same name), a kite, and a rocket which Nemo says is inspired by the amazing adventure-in-waiting that are the first commercial rocket flights(Virgin Galactic's ones, I suppose!)

Beautiful, airy, dreamy and charming as ever, this is a fresco that already takes its place amongst Nemo's great works, and inspires local inhabitants.

There's a piece about it here in the local paper Belleville Magazine:

http://www.belleville-village.com/spip.php?article2059

The Banksy/Robbo feud

Everyone's talking about this story:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6970944.ece

Thing is, I'm not sure what I think of it--I mean, it was pretty rude of Banksy to paint over Robbo's art but on the other hand what the whole thing ended up creating was a really really cool bit of art(once Robbo had his final word on it!) and also of wit, it really made art feel alive and not something static and hushed like it was in a museum or something. So I veer between thinking, cool, it's really exciting stuff, to thinking, hey, you shouldn't ever do that to someone else's art and not quite making up my mind.

Anyway what's great is it's got everyone not only in london but all over the world(at least people who are interested in the subject!) talking about street art, what it is, what it means, how different it is from gallery art etc. And I think that can only be a good thing.

In London

A very quick post from London where I'm visiting English relatives and catching the chance to have a look at some street art. Banksy of course is the best known--though ironically he's of course the enigmatic incognito artist whose real identity nobody knows(or so they say). And he also happens to be the one most influenced by the classic French street artists(he's cited Blek le Rat as probably his greatest influence). He is very cool, a sharp eye and fine wit and mostly with lots of social and/or political engagement, but not always obvious. Sometimes like with the kids with the no-ball sign, it's just joyous and poetic. Always, it's cocking a snook at dull and dulling authority and pompous little napoleons and empecheurs-de-tourner-en-rond, as we say in France!

Banksy's website: http://www.banksy.co.uk

I must say though that while I really love a lot of what he does and he's very clever and imaginative, there's a certain slickness about the way he operates which is sort of different to how the Paris street artists operate. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing but there's a lot more hype around him than there is say around Nemo or even Blek le Rat, there's a lot more commercial razzmatazz which is maybe not of his manufacturing but I can't help feeling it goes against the grain of street art. Or maybe I'm just biased cos the Paris street artists are my first and true love!

New street art friends

Been meaning to say for a while how cool and exciting it is that some great street artists are adding me as friends on Facebook. It's a big honor for me as a big fan of street art and really makes me feel part of the scene.

There's VLP, Vive La Peinture(that's at the top), two fabulous artists who have an awesome expo called Wall Street Art going at the moment at Galerie Keller, 13 rue Keller, 75011, Paris. They had the launch on November 5 which also was the launch of a really cool book about them as well as the expo, I couldn't go to it cos I was away but I've caught up with it since, it's fantastic, you should go!! It's on till December 5 so still a few weeks to go.

Then there's the great stencil and graffiti artist(and photographer) Jinks Kunst with his bold, creative works, which have so much to say(see bottom pic). Have a look at his site at http://jinkstencil.jimdo.com/

Bloggers' hiatus

I've come to the feeling blogging is a bit like the diaries you are determined to keep on New Year's Day and in a burst of enthusiasm you write in it every day for ages--or like for at least a week!--and then the entries get fewer and fewer as life, the stuff that's supposed to be in those diaries, keeps interfering and just won't stay still long enough to be noted down! Anyway that's my excuse. Sorry, guys, for being such a crap blogger of late, but things have really been hotting up here in my personal life and then I've had to do a fair bit of travel as well but I will try and do this a bit more often, the blogging, I mean!

Hospital capers!

Here's a cool video of Jerome Mesnager creating some new work for the Auberge du Jour' or day-rooms, of the Saint- Antoine hospital in the 12th arrondissement : http://www.dailymotion.com/hopital-saint-antoine
More photos here
Fabulous stuff--and you don't even have to be sick to go have a look at it! Whatever, though, it's bound to make you feel better!

Polaroid pochoir

Caught up with the coolest thing the other day--Jana and JS' polaroid-inspired pochoirs, which have been springing up all over Parisian walls in the last few months. They're a young couple--Jana is German and JS is French--and their work has this great quality of immediacy and thought-provoking juxtaposition: they often show themselves or other people clicking away with cameras in the midst of landscapes of misery and ruin and war(but no other people to be seen.) Very interesting and original stuff.

The work of Jana & Js is also being honored along with Jef Aerosol's at the Festival Artcite in Fontenay-sous-Bois. From Monday, September 28 to Saturday, October 17, 2009. So if you're in Paris get yourself over there before it ends!

Check out the artists' website at: http://janaundjs.com/

Brussels interlude

It's been a while since I wrote a post, sorry for the 'silence radio!' I've been very busy with a holiday job which has taken up all my time. But I am jumping on now to write a quick post about a trip to Brussels I managed to squeeze in last weekend with friends. We had a lot of fun there and lots of good food--moules et frites et biere was certainly not the only thing(though very good)! Brussels is a very cool city, very nice-looking and buzzy and of course it has some great street art, different to Paris(though there is some pochoir stuff and some of the Parisians have painted in Brussels too).
Belgium has of course long been known for its fantastic comic-book art, it's known as the 'Neuvieme Art' or Ninth Art there and they take it very seriously, not surprisingly, in the land of Tintin and Lucky Luke and the Smurfs! I had a fantastic time in the Centre Belge de la Bande dessinee(Belgian Comic Strip Center)which has great expos and an awesome library, you just have to see it if you're in Brussels: http://www.comicscenter.net/en/home
Because Brussels is so much the home of comic-strip art, it is not surprising that a lot of its street art echoes the comic-strip and cartoons, with several murals also paying homage to the greats like Herge. You can go on a comic-strip street art tour, too, which is quite fun. There's all sorts of other styles to spot though too.

Wall of dreams of Montreuil

There's a great post on that wonderful site I follow, La Panse de l'Ours, http://www.lapanse.com/

which is about a truly beautiful enterprise--the Montreuil Wall of Dreams. For those of you who can't read the original French on La Panse, the inhabitants of Montreuil(an area of Paris)were asked by their municipality--What do you dream about? The results--whether poem, photo, a few words, a slogan, whatever--were put in a ''Dream Box''. Then local artists, like Nemo, Mirk, Loco, AnitaLjung and others, were asked to transpose those dreams and wishes into a glorious fresco. The fresco has utterly transformed an ugly concrete wall at the exit of the A3 freeway and the entry into the Branly-Boissiere neighbourhood of Montreuil, into a Mur a Reves, or ''Wall of Dreams'', a thing of beauty, imagination and joy. La Panse has some wonderful pictures of the whole thing. Go and look!

Fantastic! Bravo to everyone concerned! If only municipalities everywhere were as imaginative!

Focus on Nemo

The great Nemo(see my earlier post, A bit of history, 4) is in my opinion the Paris street artist par excellence, and certainly my own favourite! His beautiful artworks owe something to Surrealism and children's books, dreams and 'polars' or crime novels(yes, really!) But they're very much also his own, distinctive, charming, melancholy, funny, tender and just plain fantastic!

The combination of L'Homme Noir, in his uncompromisingly adult ''film noir'' or 'polar' silhouette, and the beautiful coloured things that suddenly flow out of his gun or spray-can, or flutter around his head, or chase him, in a lovely childlike series of touching, playful, lively scenes, is brilliant and stimulates the imagination with the lightest of touches. L'Homme Noir's adventures on the streets of Paris, alone with his umbrella and his suitcase, or with a menagerie of little creatures, or floating serenely in his paper boat, or ski-ing in a sudden snowstorm, or lying in a hammock, or whatever strikes his fancy, are gentle, poetic tales which can be seen through the eyes and the mind but also the heart and soul. A great lover of the 20th arrondissement, especially around Belleville, he has enriched the lives of countless locals as well as visitors who come to his area specifically to see his work. He does not sell in galleries very much(if at all, in fact), preferring that his art should be for all. A modest and retiring man, he's not interested in publicity or marketing and his ''street-name'', Nemo, which means, in Latin, 'nobody', is testament to his enigmatic integrity.

In his work, as well as those mentioned above, and those he's cited himself, such as the work of the great American comic book artist Winsor Mc Cay, I also see influences such as the gentle, childlike buffoon Monsieur Hulot, creation of Jacques Tati; the joy and melancholy of Lamorisse's The Red Balloon; the 'polar'; children's books..Everyone sees different things, and that's the genius of Nemo, whose simplicity and depth appeal to both children and adults.

There's a great book out about Nemo, simply called Nemo, by the French writer Daniel Pennac. Even if your French it's a bit rusty(which is a pity, as Pennac's text is lovely), it's well worth getting for the beautiful pictures. There's also a very useful list at the back of (wall) addresses where you can see the works when you're in Paris. You can view and order the book here: http://www.amazon.fr/Nemo-Daniel-Pennac/dp/2842302699/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249968151&sr=8-1

So what is it about Belleville and Menilmontant?

The 20th arrondissement of Paris, especially around Belleville and Menilmontant, is what you might call the spiritual heart of Paris street art. It's here that it really took off and here that a lot of artists came from and in fact several of them, including the great Nemo, still live and paint there. They love the area. What is it about Belleville/Menilmontant that seems to inspire so many popular artists and that arouses so much affection?

Well, Belleville and surrounds have always had a pretty amazing reputation as far as real grassroots style art is concerned, in all sorts of artistic disciplines, not only visual art. Belleville's the heart of what people call 'Paris popu' , short for Paris populaire, or working-class Paris, if you like. It was where poor people went after they were pushed out of the Seine-bank areas by Baron Haussmann's radical changes to Paris architecture in the nineteenth century. It soon became known as a lively area with lots of sly-grog bars and was also quite radical, being at the centre of the Commune insurrection in Paris in the late 1870's. Independent and feisty, it has always had a huge sense of community, despite its shabby and run-down look and it's in that environment that great art has been created.

Belleville was the birthplace of France's greatest singer/songwriter, Edith Piaf. Piaf, which was her stage name, means 'sparrow' in Parisian slang--she took it because sparrows live on the street and she was a street kid herself, who ran wild in childhood. (She was also known as La Mome, which means, 'The Kid'). Her songs of heartbreak, tough philosophy and loving portraits of Paris and its characters, sung in her distinctively Parisian-accented smoky voice, are huge classics and are still loved very much today all over the world, decades after her death. For many people, she is the voice of Paris.

Belleville was also the setting for the beautiful 1950's film Le Ballon Rouge, or The Red Balloon, directed by Albert Lamorisse, which was filmed entirely on location there. A picture book of the same name with stills from the film was also produced. Those of us who know and love Nemo's Black Silhouette's red balloon are sure it comes from there!

Another fabulous work of art set in Belleville is the 1950's children's classic, Le Cheval Sans Tete(published in English as A Hundred Million Francs)which tells of the amazing adventures of some poor but very resourceful Paris kids after they discover a toy horse filled with money at a dump. It's still in print 50 years down the track.

A recent weird and wonderful French animated film, The Triplets of Belleville, (2003)is set there too, while nearby Menilmontant features in a famous song by another great French singer/songwriter of the past, Charles Trenet, who paid tribute to its tough working-class spirit in Les Gars de Menilmontant, which in turn inspired an exuberant street painting by Jerome Mesnager!

Today Belleville and Menilmontant continue to inspire fantastic popular art, with wonderful works by Nemo and Mesnager and Mosko et associes and others enjoyed by locals and visitors alike. It's also an interesting and lively area with people from everywhere, some great cheap places to eat, a fabulous park with some of the best views over Paris and if you're in Paris, you've just got to check it out!

A few newer artists to watch out for

As well as the classic, and still-going-strong greats like Nemo and Mesnager and Mosko et associes and Blek le Rat and Miss Tic and so on, there's some interesting newer pochoir Paris street artists to watch out for. Here's a couple of good ones:

Artiste Ouvrier, (real name Pierre-Benoit Dumont--bottom pictures) is one of my favourites of the newer ones, his lush images and narrative richness are just great. He uses a technique known as 'pochoir chinois' (Chinese stencil) which is actually just like a stencil negative, if 'ordinary' stencil is the 'positive'. As well as the beautiful street art, Artiste Ouvrier has created a unique Tarot that you can order from him. His website is at http://www.artiste-ouvrier.com/

Another new favourite is Bonom, a young artist who like Mosko et associes, loves to features animals-huge animals!--including dinosaurs, on the Paris walls he enlivens. He's also jungled things up in Brussels, which is another place where you can see some great street art.

A bit of history 7: the story of Le Bateleur

Le Bateleur was a very talented street artist who diedyoung, in his early thirties, in 1996. Like many of the greats of Paris pochoir art, such as Nemo, he came from the poor 20th arrondissement of Paris, in his case Menilmontant. When he was 3, with four brothers and sisters, his mother died and his father, a service-station attendant, lost the plot and neglected his children, who soon ran wild in the streets. His grandmother tried to help but when she died, the children were taken from their father. At the age of ten, Le Bateleur was put in a children's home, where he spent the next 8 years. It was, as he said in an interview(you can see it on http://www.chris-kutschera.com/) fine materially but emotionally a disaster which affected his whole life. He left at 18, in revolt at society and soon fell into drugs and crime, eventually ending up going to prison for 3 years. He'd always loved art and was always drawing but was not encouraged to do so--at the home he was trained as a cook. A love affair in which his girlfriend had his child encouraged a new beginning, and he got off the drugs and put his life back on track. He did all sorts of things, ran a bar in Marseille, went to live in the Antilles Islands, but on coming back to Paris decided to start creating street art.

He took the name Le Bateleur--which he'd used from the age of 15--because it was the Tarot figure that kept coming up in the readings he did. (Le Bateleur in French is the Tarot figure known in English as the Magician--traditionally on French Tarot cards he's depicted as a street magician.) Le Bateleur's striking pictures, mixed with text, started to make their impression on the walls of Paris but though the artist started to become more famous, he didn't give up on his ideals of simplicity and a refusal to cave in to what he saw as a twisted society's lack of care for human beings, and its concentration on status and money. When he did sell artworks, he never asked for much money, and very often he would give them away. And of course his street art was freely created..Poor, still living in a squat and battling bravely for his living, Le Bateleur epitomised the rebellious, suffering figure of the artist. His untimely death robbed street art of one of its most amazing figures. RIP, Le Bateleur. You are sadly missed.

In 1997, a year after Le Bateleur, fellow street artist and friend Nemo created a tribute work to his memory. You can see it at the top of this page(the other three are works by Le Bateleur).

A bit of history 6: Miss Tic and Jef Aerosol

Miss Tic is one of the few female pochoir street artists working on Paris walls, but her very distinctive work, which blends text and picture, philosophical aphorisms, bits of poetic wisdom and elegant, stylised Parisian women based on her own silhouette, has become a favourite of many people. Most of her work is concerned with love, seen from a feminine angle, and in fact it was love--the pain of losing it--that drove her, to coin a phrase, to the wall! It was out of the ashes of her relationship with Blek le Rat that Miss Tic the street artist was born, in the mid-1980's. Before that, she'd been a poet, newspaper critic and street theatre performer. She considers herself to be both writer and artist: as she put it, 'the wall is my publisher'.

Jef Aerosol also started in the 1980's, but in Tours, not Paris(though now there's a lot of his work in the capital). A lover of punk music, especially The Clash, he started painting on walls because he wanted to attract the attention of the local music scene to his potential as a record-cover and poster artist! It certainly worked and he soon found himself hobnobbing with all kinds of musicians. His work is still very much inspired by music--not just punk, but rock and blues too. But also by the 'man in the street' passersby, his family, friends etc.

a bit of history 5: Mosko et associes and Jerome Mesnager

In the same generation of street artists are two(or rather three, you'll see why in a moment!)of my other favourites, Mosko et associes and Jerome Mesnager. They also started in the 80's. Mosko et associes are actually a duo of artists, Gerard Laux and Michel Allemand--the name Mosko refers to the Moskowa neighbourhood of Paris where Gerard comes from. In the book about them called Savanes Urbaines(Editions Alternatives)it says that the artists met in the Moskowa in the 80's--Gerard had already started painting on walls there and Michel was going around Paris taking photos of street art. Gerard challenged him to leave the camera and create himself--which he did. The artists have had a long and fruitful collaboration since then and their distinctive art, featuring animals from the savannah and the jungle, full of colour and movement and fun, appears on walls all over the place, delighting people of all ages, transporting them into a powerful and imaginative animal world.

Jerome Mesnager also began in the 80's. He was the founder of a movement called Zig-Zag, which zigzagged all over Paris creating street art and graffiti of all sorts. His well-known signature figure is the 'Bonhomme Blanc' or 'Corps Blanc' .That means literally 'White Fellow' or 'White Body' but that doesn't quite have the same connotation as in French--some people call the figure, in English, White Ghost and that has more of the mysteriously tantalising yet homely spirit of the French original, I think. He's haunted Paris now for 25 years but has also had adventures in places as far-flung as New York, Colombia, Cuba, China and more.
Unlike Nemo and Mosko et associes and Miss Tic and Blek le Rat and in fact most of the other street artists, Mesnager does not use stencils, but creates his pictures by freehand, very rapid painting(in some cases, he's said, in 26 seconds!) That sensation of freedom and swift movement is very apparent in his work.

A bit of history 4--Blek le Rat and Nemo

It was in the 1980's that the work of the artists I'm especially interested in began. In Anglo-Saxon countries like Britain and the USA and Australia, graffiti of the American-inspired urban 'hip-hop' style and tagging became popular but in France it was rather different. One of the very first of the pochoir artists, Blek le Rat, said he tried out that style in Paris but it didn't work, it somehow didn't suit the place. So instead he turned for inspiration to the work of people like Ernest Pignon-Ernest, and decided to use stencils(pochoirs in French)for his street art. At first he began with a group of friends stencilling little rats all over the place(hence the name) but then graduated to much more ambitious stuff.
About this time too there began to appear on the walls of the 20th arrondissement in Paris(an area that has always sported the work of my favourites)modest little stencils based on 'Little Nemo' and signed 'Nemo.' This was the humble beginning of one of the most beloved of Paris street artists, Nemo. In the book about him written by the French novelist Daniel Pennac, it says that Nemo started creating his stencils inspired by the fact he was re-reading a childhood favourite--Little Nemo--to his own young son, who was starting school and was a little overwhelmed by it all(and who doesn't remember that feeling!) To make him feel better, his dad created these modest little street artworks all along the road to school so he could feel a comforting sense of familiarity and imaginative freedom too. Who wouldn't want a dad like that!

But as his son got older and school less traumatic, Nemo stopped doing his Little Nemo stencils. Pennac writes that after a silence of a few years, suddenly Nemo started appearing again on the walls of the 20th arrondissement and beyond--the now-famous black silhouette, reminiscent of detective-fiction and film noir, delightfully and incongruously pursuing dreamlike adventures all over the place. They have a kind of fairytale quality, a unique combination of wistful, dreamy sadness and tenderness and joyful humour, that really capture people's imagination--children and adults. They also celebrate the poor but community-rich areas where Nemo has always lived and which he loves. I'll write more on what I see in his art--probably my favourite of all-- in a later post.

A bit of history 3

The modern history of French street art starts in the 1970's, with the work of artists like Ernest Pignon-Ernest(three bottom pictures), Gerald Zlotykamien(first picture) and Jean le Gac(second picture).

Ernest Pignon-Ernest's wonderful murals in places like Soweto and Naples and later Paris are now considered classics of the genre and greatly influenced the upcoming pochoir artists like Blek le Rat, Nemo, Jerome Mesnager and Mosko. His revolutionary wish to bring art to the people, clever allusions to great artists like Cavaraggio and sense of narrative and character are all still very much a feature of the best street art in Paris. His work is found on walls, on phone booths and these days very much in the studio too(he's still painting) He's also got a site(in French) at http://www.pignon-ernest.com

Jean le Gac is also an artist whose classical gift of style and narrative is strongly inspirational. There are examples of his art in Paris streets(like the one pictured, of a detective). Gerald Zlotykamien's work was very influenced by graffiti, and in turn he influenced the work of modern artists like Speedy Graffito.

A bit of history, 2

In the 18th and 19th centuries, silhouette portraits(top right) became popular, and this particular style was also to influence modern street art. Then with the big success of two famous French art movements: Art Nouveau, from 1890-1914, and Art Deco, from the 1920's and 1930's, stencilling took off again in a big way. The beautiful flowing, plant-vine like lines of Art Nouveau (middle pictures) and the crisp, elegant lines of Art Deco(bottom picture) were a very happy match with stencils. Modern Paris street artists are still influenced by both.

As well, a huge influence was the comic strip, which really started to come into its own in the 20th century. One of the most influential of the early comic-book artists was the American Winsor McCay, whose 'Little Nemo' series (published around 1903--top left picture)inspired an explosion of comic-book talent--in Belgium, for instance, the publication of Little Nemo in French was directly responsible for the flourishing of what they call there the 'Ninth Art', as famous a Belgian product as chocolates or beer! Tintin and co owe their existence to such an inspiration. But it also greatly influenced, even many, many years down the track, a whole generation of street artists--and in Paris, especially Nemo, of course.