I don’t think I will say too much here, other than state that I enjoyed the buzz in the city around Nuart. I got to meet many of the artists and volunteers and loved watching the pieces develop. I will display some of my images of each artist’s pieces in the order they were shown on the Nuart map.
Anders Gjennestad aka Strøk
A talented stencil artist from Norway, who uses his own photographs as inspiration for creating his highly detailed stencils, he then adds multiple layers to his pieces adding shadows etc. The finished characters do not appear to follow the laws of gravity, and they are often portrayed upside down, on old walls, doors or rusty metal panels.
SMUG
Sam Bates (aka Smug or sometimes Smug-one) is an Australian contemporary street artist of great skill who has produced high-quality murals demonstrating a photorealistic style in Glasgow and globally.
Jan Vormann
Jan is a sculptor from Berlin, who has travelled the world fixing crumbling walls and buildings with multi-coloured LEGO blocks. His colourful bricks imitate the brick or stone built buildings he patches at a miniature scale.
(if you look closely at one of the images you will see one of Isaac Cordal’s little men watching him work)
Ben Eine
Londoner Ben is regarded as one of the most successful street artists in the world and is regarded as a pioneer in the exploration of graffiti typography.
Currently, Ben’s work is held in the permanent collections of the V&A, London, The Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles and galleries worldwide.
Axel Void
Axel Void is a Spanish street artist, known for his often shocking and dark artworks address psychological and social problems that are emphasized by his technique that is influenced by classical painting and drawing. Mixing graffiti, acrylic and oil paint, dark colours and contrast dominate his visually intense artworks.
Dotmasters
The Dotmaster, a UK artist, started painting on the streets of Brighton in the early ’90s. He takes a sideways look at a populist media with a typically English sense of humour. His work is impeccably detailed – his half-tone work, stark black and white street pieces and unique, photo-real colour stencils all create street-based illusions that fool the eye.
He has brought his “Rude Kids” to Aberdeen, a series of Rude Kids, life-sized stencils of kids and teenagers all posing with various obscene hand gestures. He said they are all his children’s friends and that they really aren’t all that rude!
Dotmasters work appears on 2 walls, the first on the boarded windows of the old Esslemont & Macintosh building on Netherkirkgate and the other on a long low wall at the side of the TISO shop on Jopps Lane, the length of this wall and the narrowness of the street was even too much for my 10mm lens!
Netherkirkgate (some of them)
Jopps Lane
EMEMEM
Ememem is the pseudonym of an artist known for his urban art that he called “flacking”. This consists of blocking potholes or other faults in pavements, like cracks and potholes, with tiles. For Nuart he “flacked” in a number of locations, he even “repaired” a tree stump in the cemetery at the Kirk of St. Nicholas.
Helen Bur
Helen Bur is a British artist currently working on walls at home and overseas, her work addresses current issues and events. The water-colour effect of her large murals makes for very powerful evocative pictures, I would love to know more about the subjects in the ones she created for Nuart.
Hama Woods
Hama is a Norwegian stencil artist known for her sociological approach to consumerism and the effect it has on the natural environment. Her works are characterised by the use of hand cut, multi-layered stencils which are then painted using spray paint.
Hama worked on 2 walls for Nuart, one a large Leopard, (apparently, a heraldic symbol that has been noted in Aberdeen’s history for centuries) on Crooked Lane and another on George Street above the Science Centre (I didn’t get good photographs of this one).
Hush
Englishman Hush is an exciting urban artist who combines street art with more traditional art practices. One of Hush’s primary concerns is the representation of women, typically Japanese traditional female entertainers depicted through their feminine beauty and sensuality.
Hush’s extraordinary style is unmistakable, his dynamic approach to urban art, the hand-finished elements on his portraits.
EVOL
EVOL, who lives and works in Berlin, transforms electric boxes, small planters and other geometric city forms, into miniature apartment buildings using a layered stencil technique. His listed piece for Nuart is in a corner of Marishcal Square, however, he had also created others around the city and it was great fun seeing the reaction of people when they first encountered his work.
VHILS
VHILS (Alexandre Farto), is a Portuguese artist living and working between London and Lisbon, although he has worked around the world, I first discovered his work in Fremantle, Western Australia, where he created on the wall of the Norfolk Hotel an original image of the first Australian female senator.
Vhils’ technique and tools evolve as his work progresses. He enjoys the suspense of not knowing what patterns and images await in the layers beneath. The final layer product on the surface is his final goal. He currently works with photographs taken by himself or his team. He breaks most of his portraits into three colours, and these colours help provide depth – similar to a stencil. Finally, he begins his carving process with chisels, hammers, drills, etching acid, bleach, and other tools to expose the ‘history’ of the wall.
VHILS piece for Nuart, overlooking the Union Square car park, references Aberdonians who fought in the Spanish Civil War. It depicts a scene taken from an old photograph of a local man, John Londragan, on the left of the scene, with another man, pictured with two Spanish children. There is also a mural created by VHILS in Nando’s on Belmont Street that I have included, I don’t when or why it was created.
Jim's travels 