For the first time ever, artists commissioned by the Royal Albert Hall in partnership with Daydream Network, turn the walls of the historic venue’s Loading Bay into a gallery of graffiti and street artwork.

LOAD took a graphical journey through some of the most memorable moments in the Hall’s existence starting with its opening in 1871 through to one of the first showcases of electric lighting, the suffragettes movement, Winston Churchill’s TV broadcast with Lord Montgomery and Mohammed Ali’s knock out rounds.

Using stencil style, photorealistic and freehand techniques, working with colour schemes and typography to bring the exhibition to life. Have a look at the photos below.

Daydream network website

the Poster Museum at Wilanów was opened as the world’s first poster museum, a branch of the National Museum in Warasaw.Presently the Museum boasts one of the largest collections of art posters in the world, consisting of over 55,000 items.

The collection of Polish posters of 1892-2002 contains about 30,000 items and is the most complete set of works in the world considered to be a canon in this area of artistic activity. The collection of foreign posters, which has emerged mostly due to grants from the Warsaw Biennale and gifts from artists from world over, is also considered as the one of the finest collections of world art posters.

I`ve been there and I really recommend the visit, worth every cent.

Alan Aldridge is a UK artist. Born in 1943 in East London. His career began in 1965 when he happened to meet the art director of Penguin Books, and began producing illustrations for book covers. Over the next two years he took over as art director, and introduced his style which resonated with the mood of the time. In 1968 he moved to his own graphic-design firm, INK, which became closely involved with graphic images for the Beatles and Apple Corps.

Aldridge illustrated lyric books for the Beatles, album covers for the Rolling Stones, the Who and Elton John, was Art Director for Penguin, illustrated children’s books such as the much loved The Butterfly Ball and designed adverts and identities for iconic brands such as the House of Blues and the Hard Rock Café.

I have seen his retrospective at Design Museum in London and I am posting the pictures below.

Alan Aldridge`s Web site

French graffiti artist C215 aka Christian Guémy is travelling around the world making his mark. He says:

“It was only three years ago that I turned to stencil art in order to place nice pictures on the streets quickly and without authorisation. I chose this name because it sounds like a code or a jail number. Life, sometimes, is like a prison. Also, it implies that we are nothing more than anonymous numbers in a city. I love to place my characters in abandoned buildings. They inhabit those places like ghosts, they underline the life that once was there. Street art is like surfing. You have to travel to experience new situations, new contexts and new people.”

His images are solitary faces and figures, captivating in their loneliness. He has been US, Brazil, Israel, Morocco, India, Poland, France, England, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.

If you want to see his photos, click here to go to his flickr

The videos below were made in Diadema, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Part 1

Part2

Roisin Murphy, formerly of Moloko, presented you last disc “Overpowered” at Brixton Academy. A heady mix of electronic dance anthems, soul-stirring pop songs, deep, dark funk and quirky lyrical genius, ‘Overpowered’ is a thrilling and contemporary marriage of edgy pop and irresistible disco. The gig was insane, amazing stage, crazy combination with videos and lights. check it out.

The good surprise was the singer, multi instrumentalist & DJ, Bishi, who supported Roisin gig. Bishi was born in Earls Court to a Bengali musical family. She has studied Sitar at The Ravi Shankar School for Music and has a passion for English & East European folk, progressive pop & electronica.

As ever Bishi is exploring Britain ancient and modern in her own unique way. With inspirations as diverse as Derek Jarman, The Who, Tallis, Pendulum, Chaucer and Boudica it promises to be a heady mix and a heavy show !

Have a look below one of her songs.

That weekend I went to Victoria and Albert Museum to get some references for future illustrations. V&A Museum in South Kensington is the world’s greatest museum of art and design, with collections unrivalled in their scope and diversity. Discover 3000 years’ worth of amazing artefacts from many of the world’s richest cultures including ceramics, furniture, fashion, glass, jewellery, metalwork, photographs, sculpture, textiles and paintings.

I am posting here some of the pieces I saw there. Get inspired!

That is a special post about the city I was born, São Paulo in Brazil.

Pixação in São Paulo.

Emerging in the 1980s in São Paulo, pixação quickly became one of the most aggressive and controversial forms of expression to date, turning its artists, the pixadores, into one of the most marginalized social groups in the city.

Constantly in search of adrenaline, social resistance and recognition, the pixadores enter the city center from the outskirts in order to assert their existence through bold nocturnal actions – nightly escapes from the social exclusion that weighs on their daily lives.

Seeing as pixação declares itself as a visual challenge against elite aesthetics and also stands as a clear reflection of the city’s conflicted social context, the main objective of this photo essay is to question the social structures that drive a generation of youth to feel that their only creative outlet lies in the degradation of the urban landscape.

Copy and photo from CHOQUE`s Fotoblog, click here to see all photos

São Paulo Urban Landscapes by photographer and artist Flavio Samelo

Click here and check Flavio`s Fotoblog

Thievery Corporation is a Washington DC-based production and DJ duo consisting of Rob Garza and Eric Hilton and their supporting artists. Their music can be characterized as downtempo/electronica with influences of dub, acid jazz, indian classical and brazilian styles fused together with a lounge aesthetic.

They have been in London with their touring band, including a full horn section and sitar player, dropping gems off their recent album ‘Radio Retaliation’, a disc full with strong humanitarian and political messages. The usual worldbeat influences still working really well, Jamaica, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Arabia, featuring world-music artists Femi Kuti, Seu Jorge, Anushka Shankar, Jana Andevska and Sleepy Wonder.

They have played on thursday 16th October at Shepherds Bush Empire, check it out!

Thievery Corporation web site

Click here to see more videos from that gig.

JR transforms his pictures into posters and makes open space photo galleries out of streets. He was part of the Tate Modern Street Art exhbition where graffiti artists from cities around the world including Bologna, Spain and Sao Paulo were invited to create 15-metre-tall art displays.

Now JR has his solo show at Lazarides Gallery, The show will be linked by a street work inspired by JR’s time spent in Rio de Janeiro, where he worked on his project, 28 Millimetres: WOMEN. In the favelas he met women for whom crime, violent loss of loved ones and arbitrary repression are part of everyday life. His response was to paste images of their eyes onto the buildings of Providencia, creating an arresting image that was seen around the world, and fuelled JR’s ongoing campaign to draw attention to things that go unnoticed.

JR - 28 Millimetres: WOMEN
Lazarides Gallery, Greek Street/Charing Cross
3 October – 14 November 2008, 11am-7pm
FREE

Lazarides Gallery web site

JR website

The ICA London presented that week the live installation Memory Cloud at Trafalgar Square. Memory Cloud is based on smoke signals, visitors could participate by sending text messages that were grafted onto plumes of smoke, fusing ancient and contemporary forms of communication. Method of textual inscription works with light as virtual ink that perceptually writes and erases through a cinematic interplay with the external environment. Memory Cloud aims to motivate social interaction through the construction of an environment that is given form through a collective act of writing space.

Created by Minimaforms, which was founded by brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos as an experimental architecture and design practice that explores projects that provoke and facilitate new means of communication.

www.minimaforms.com/

I went there on friday night and made some photos, have a look below.