Best Believe ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

This Sunday…”Ink will Spill”. This is the qualifier, for the background story read here.

“LOVESTAIN”
PRESENTED BY STOLENSPACE
(LONDON)

Exhibition from 1st – 18th October 2009

GALLERY HOURS: TUESDAY – SUNDAY, 11:00am – 7.00pm

Okay it’s in London – but this is big potatoes…

StolenSpace are proud to present ‘Lovestain’ a UK premier solo show from world renowned female street artist, Miss Van. A retrospective as well as a new body of work and taking over two exhibition spaces at StolenSpace, this will be her largest solo show to date. 
Toulouse native and current Barcelona resident Miss Van started to paint her graffiti on the streets during the 90s, at the age of 18. Her overtly feminine street art was a breath of fresh air in a  traditionally masculine movement of urban art and paved the way for many contemporaries. Now her infamous sultry female characters, known as her ‘Poupes’, are seen on the streets and in galleries alike all over the world.

From these pouting, sulky girls emerges a certain sensuality and disconcerting eroticism that is frank and unabashed. Their thoughts are palpable and the paintings become real in both flesh and spirit. Miss Van creates her characters with an innovative spirit.  Affirming her style, the artist infuses into her work traits from her own personality, rendering them thus, self-portraits. It is through their fantasy that the sensitivity and fragility of the artist is expressed. She takes pleasure in playing with ambiguities, her dolls are childlike women that are equally angelic and devilish. They have a rare appeal that transcends gender-an appeal that also extends to the work that she shows in galleries.
  
Over the years, Miss Van’s characters keep evolving. They have become less cute and  more dangerously alluring, edgier – their sexy aura made all the more complex by their increasingly ambiguous facial expressions. The more she has moved into gallery work and can work with the nuances of more fragile media than the streets allow (pencil, for one), her characters have grown even more sensitive, subtle, and delicately rendered.

Featuring a retrospective of her work & new paintings this show also sees the release of 2 rare exclusive hand pulled limited edition screen prints from Miss Van

For all the details check here.

Following on from my last post, we hear from Nicole Scribbel a visual artist from Wolverhampton who is contributing to the literary landscape of the city by leaving word play all over the streets of Birmingham. Her “Spontaneous Art Shows” are a type of mysterious street art that is deposited for passersby to glimpse, or take home and enjoy. In an exclusive interview with Best Believe she explains how her passion for words and lettering started at a young age.

During school I developed my own style of handwriting (quite possibly influenced by the music I was listening to, and the records I was buying at that time). It was a subconscious thing and looking back now, I realise it was my way of expressing myself.
Around the late eighties to mid nineties, I would spend time admiring the graffiti that was happening in my area and would often doodle out my own words three dimensionally in different styles. Heavily into music, I would also listen carefully to lyrics and scribble them down on record sleeve inners in order to try and decipher what the artist was trying to say.
Later down the line, after some formal training as a “Fine Artist”, the battle of not wanting to be moulded into a pretentious Art Twit with an A, and undoing a wee bit of confusion, I have reversed back ten to fifteen years, working with letters and words once more.

In my eyes, letters are line drawings, and in day-to-day life we use these alongside signs, shapes and symbols to communicate with one and another and they help give us guidance. And depending on who we are and where we are from, they may differ slightly.
My Slogans or “Word Art” are an attempt in some cases to communicate with people and make people think and re-asses their priorities in life but also a form of self-expression for myself. It’s where I am able to release my frustrations and celebrations.

Words are powerful, and by even reading a single word, it can trigger many thoughts and/or images in your mind.
I currently adapt well-known nursery rhymes into thought provoking statements, which perhaps reflect the more serious side to my personality. In contrast, I also make my own rhyming slang as a more humorous way of communicating my thoughts. For me personally my work acts as a kind of diary, as it documents certain moments in time.
And as Sister Corita Kent once said “I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.” And this I can relate to.

Typography and lettering is an expressive part of Birmingham’s visual identity. Islamic calligraphy, neon signs, tags, mysterious handwritten signs in Mandarin stuck to dirty windows and the fallen glory of broken shop lettering – which now reads ‘Ma     l ather s ores’. The aim of ‘Graphic DNA’ is to document these letterforms and to trace the changes to the city’s graphic DNA brought about by regeneration, recording the evolving lettering landscape before the opportunity is lost for ever.

Graphic DNA is a long term project which aims to delineate and profile the graphic character of Birmingham through photographing, gathering, curating, cataloguing and describing the letterforms found in the city’s urban and civic environment. The Project is led by Type with the able assistance of Alexander Barton, Hilary Lovell, Matt Murtagh, Veronika Pechova, Hannah Wood all students at the Birmingham Institue of Art & Desgn.

Why Birmingham?

Birmingham is in a state of metamorphosis, evolving from a city dominated by manufacturing to one led by the creative sector. Industrial Birmingham is being redeveloped and regenerated and a new city is emerging: letterforms that have been obscured for decades are being temporarily exposed before the developers move in, and new letterforms are being added daily. Further more, Birmingham is a hybrid city that for centuries has been home to immigrants from across the country and around the world. The history and evolution of Birmingham’s immigrant populations are relvealed in the letterforms on its streets and the marks left by the city’s multicultural society will be documented and curated by the project. The project is in part graphic rescue.

Why lettering?

Street lettering is an artistic amalgam of letterforms mixed with substrate, language, placement, and proportion. Letterforms are excellent vehicles for demonstrating how the environment, human judgement, necessity, and repetition can add visual music to the streets. This project will capture, catalogue and curate images of letterforms culled from Birmingham’s streets -  both past and present – to show the city’s unique graphic character.

To read more about this project check here. If lettering and design is your bag then you may fancy a look at Helvetica a documentary film by Gary Hustwit.

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.

Picture credit: Blacksmile from Spinwell.

We all know that the first rule of fight club is don’t talk about fight club but nobody said a girl can’t blog about it. Birmingham’s answer to fight club uses pens and poscas rather than bare knuckles and fists, but is just as underground and sometimes just as moody.

Secret Wars has been a revelation – A cultural movement that is spreading across the globe! Started in March 06’ (By Monorex kingpin, Terry Guy in London UK) as a testing ground for artists to show the public what they can do. The idea quickly evolved into a knockout cup style contest that now attracts huge crowds of people anywhere it is held.
Seeds, Slobz and Keefy run and maintain the Birmingham rounds.

Secret Wars is the world’s premier live art battle, and in Birmingham…. things get very live.. Illustrator vs graf writer vs comic book writer vs street artist vs toy maker vs animator vs graphic designer etc etc etc …

This dissident group of artists meet regularly at The Rainbow to battle one and other, the rules are simple:

- 90 MINS ON THE CLOCK
- BLACK PAINT ONLY – ON WHITE WALLS!
- NO SKETCHES / NO PENCILS
- INVISIBLE MIDDLE LINE WITH AN ARTIST EITHER SIDE

JUDGED USING A 3 POINT SYSTEM – 2 GUEST JUDGES AND A CROWD VOTE (USING A DECIBEL READER)

GO BIG OR GO HOME!

Much like the 1984 comic Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars the key players from the scene, both evil and good get summoned to the planet “battleworld” in a distant galaxy (The Rainbow in our case) to duel to the death. I wouldn’t like to speculate on who the heroes and their opposing villains are in the Secret Wars Birmingham series but just like in the comics, world domination is getting to look quite attractive. The boys in charge have decided to put together a crack team of artists that can compete in battles throughout the UK and Europe.

Representing our city will be a squad of 5 artists, made up of previous winners Phill Blake and Newso with all round heavy weights in the field of graffiti illustration; Chu & Agent.

With four already in the crew the hunt is on to find the 5^th member, this place will be given to the overall winner of the mini series that kicks off at The Rainbow on Sunday 4th October at 4pm, then on every Sunday through October and November. The official draw was pulled on the Secret Wars radio show on Rhubarb Radio and is as follows: AS-ONE / MIKEY BRAINS / POSH-ONE / ROO / SOL1R / SYLPH / TITLE / TX

For all the info on round one check the facebook page …Let the battle commence!