Monday, June 12, 2006

Graf

The street art around the place continues to impress.

I've tracked "neonate" from a phone booth in Aro Valley to a door on a derelict building in Thorndon, deep in the heart of the government precinct:



This showed up briefly on the Winslow Appts building in Aro Street last summer before being painted out; it may be my favourite ever:



I'm particularly fond of the very well-rendered teeth - highly reminiscent of the broken and battered stumps in a cattle skull that's been washed up on a beach - and the complex system on the left which makes me think of circuit diagrams and the illustrations in a maritime semaphore manual.

This guy has just started popping up lately:



Gut instinct tells me it could be by neonate too, but I'm happy to be wrong.




These slightly-less stylised images have been popping up too. I have a real soft spot for them, despite - or possibly even because - they look like stuff I have been drawing lately. Whether or not the "circle-P" graf forms the same supposed function as the ol' shoes over the power-line trick (Snopes; Urban Legends; Strait Dope) I am not sure.

I'm not 100% sure either what is going on here (on a pavement in Constable Street, Newtown):


It may be as innocuous as marking out a site for a proposed joint reticulation (cable, gas, power, phone, whatever) but it reminds me of the runes you see on album covers of Finnish black metal bands (not that I could find any on the 'web; a French band will have to do).

Finally - someone has gone to an awful lot of trouble to helpfully mark up the urinal at Lovelock's sports bar in large (and presumably waterproof) Letraset-style adhesive type:


I felt that some form of honouring of this effort was appropriate. So, here's to you, whomsoever you may be. Cheers.

(as usual, click the images for larger versions)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Astroblastro has some good Neonate ones on Flickr and so does the Wellington Street art group...

Hadyn said...

While trying to stay un-geeky, those brown ones look like runes but could also be symbols used to surf other peoples wifi.