Primer | Street Artists

Do you know your Banksy from your Ben Eine? Get a quick street artist 101 here and feel a little more informed and a lot more ‘street’. Just don’t do any ‘yoof’ hand gestures, ok?

With Banksys selling for thousands and colourful murals cheering our town and city walls more than ever, there’s never been a better time to start becoming a bit more aware of what you’re looking at on your local walls and pavements. Street artists all over the country are using the great outdoors to bring joy, make statements and just make us stop and stare. Next time you’re thinking ‘that’s clever, I wonder who did that…’ you might find the answer here.

Banksy

The daddy of street art currently. Banksy’s art tends not to be fabulously beautiful but more political with a dose of humour. 

Look for: His trademark black and white stencil style with spots of colour. 

Find it in: Very public places (he doesn’t do railways sidings or out-of-the-way spots). He also always asks permission so if you want to know if it’s a Banksy, knock on the door of the building and ask!

Do say: “I think you’ll find latest belief is that Banksy is not in fact Robert del Naja of the band Massive Attack, but a whole art collective.” 

Don’t say: “I can’t believe he shredded that lovely picture. What a waste!”

Cornbread

Lesser known as Darryl McCray, this Philadelphia artist is considered to be the first modern graffiti writer. In that sense he’s really a tagger rather than an artist. 

Look for: His famous ‘Cornbread’ tag. It’s very simple and he’s all about the tag rather than visuals. 

Find it in: Philadelphia, naturally. Often on road signs. 

Do say: “Did you know Cornbread got his nickname in juvenile detention centre?”

Don’t say: “But it’s just his NAME! Where’s the art?”

Keith Haring

You’ll know Keith Haring even if you think you don’t; he’s the pop artist with the colourful faceless figures. Once part of the NYC subculture, now his art is all over galleries and calendars for us all to enjoy. 

Look for: His famous ‘continuous line’ - he was able to paint a whole picture without using several ‘strokes’ like most graffiti artists. If the piece is signed by him (and they often aren’t) the signature will be subtle and hard to spot. 

Find it in: New York City where there are still five murals. Or in galleries around the world. There was an exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2019 so keep your eyes peeled for more. 

Do say: “You can really see Haring’s fascination with semiotics coming through in the text-like shape of his art, can’t you?”

Don’t say: “Did he forget to draw the faces on those guys?”

Annatomix

Birmingham street artist Annatomix is known for her geometric murals of birds and wildlife - as well as some humans, including a mural of David Bowie. 

Look for: Colourful, geometric animals - often mistaken for being origami. “ I can understand why people may see a relation to origami in my work, but my influence actually comes from geometry, low poly modelling, crystalline structures and architecture,” she says. 

Find it in: Birmingham and other places. Don’t miss the amazing birds mural in Wandsworth, south London. 

Do say: “It’s fascinating the way her style clearly nods to our future with nature - more robotic and less organic in many ways…”

Don’t say: “Ooh! Can you do a swan out of a napkin?”

Ben Eine

Londoner, Ben Eine is known for his colourful, often circus style, typographic art. One of his most famous pieces to date is his mural on the side of Shoreditch’s Village Underground, a tribute to the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster that reads: “You saw it in the tears of those who survived.”

Look for: Huge, brightly coloured letters. 

Find it in: London - all over but particularly East London, though he’s now so famous he has his own shop where you can purchase your own Ben Eine in the form of a face mask if you wish.

Do say: “The words represent so much more than the mere letters they are made up of…”

Don’t say: “Well that’s confusing. It clearly says ‘Social Club’ here in large letters but in fact it’s just a garage. Am I in the wrong place?”

If you’re inspired to see more beautiful things on the streets near you, don’t miss our feature Art in the Wild, starting on page 64 of our February issue. Buy this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe

More from our February issue…

More outings to enjoy…

Visit | Giant Statues

In our November issue, we explore some of the most awe-inspiring places around the UK (our own Seven Wonders of the World). One was the Kelpies, which you can read about below. And, if you’re inspired to visit more giant sculptures, we’ve put together a list of a few that are on our bucket list. 

On the unremarkable stretch of the M9 between Edinburgh and Glasgow, just close to junction 6 for Falkirk, there’s a sight to lift even the most dreich day. Two giant horse heads: The Kelpies. They’re named after Scottish mythology’s shapeshifting water beasts, but each sinew and twitch is based on two real Clydesdale horses, Duke and Baron. 30-metre tall gatekeepers to a Forth and Clyde Canal extension, they honour the hard-worked horses once used to pull barges. To really appreciate their magnificence, approach on foot, through Helix Park and crane your neck to acknowledge the wonder of their construction, all 27,000 steel pieces of it. Seven years after their completion, they’re firmly rooted in their landscape, a point of local pride. Guardians, as their sculptor Andy Scott describes them – hopefully for many years to come.

If you fancy seeing some awe-inspiringly big art, you might also like to visit one of the following...

The Angel of the North

We must kick of the list with the most famous large sculpture in Britain, Anthony Gormley’s Angel, which spreads its wings across a hill at Low Eighton, overlooking the A1 and A167 at 20 metres tall. The body is based on a cast of Gormley’s own body. 

Messenger

Located outside the Theatre Royal in Plymouth, Joseph Hillier’s 7m tall statue is based on a pose by one cast member, Nicola Kavanagh, about to run on stage during a production of Othello in 2014. It’s the largest sculpture made in the UK using the ‘lost wax’ method. 

Verity, Ilfracombe

Damien Hirst’s Verity stands (more than 20 metres tall) looking out over the Bristol Channel, at the entrance to Ilfracombe harbour. Verity is a pregnant woman, holding a sword and the scales of justice, standing on a pile of law books. It’s on loan to the town for 20 years.  

Horse of the South

Nic Fiddian-Green’s Horse of the South is a giant horse’s head that stands just by the A3 near the Esher bypass turn off, as a protest against urban sprawl in the area. He hopes one day to install a giant horse in the South Downs to rival Gormley’s Angel of the North. 

The Giant Spoon

You wouldn’t think a giant spoon would be hard to find, but this sculpture on the edge of a field in Cramlington, Northumberland, takes a bit of hunting down. The dessert spoon is 4.5m tall and was installed as part of the Eat for England campaign to encourage people to get out into the countryside. 

Irwell Valley Sculpture Trail

Winding from Bacup to Salford Quays, this is the largest sculpture trail in England, which includes 28 sculptures of all shapes and sizes, including a huge giant picture frame so you can be a work of art yourself. 

Terris Novalis

Created by Tony Cragg on what was once the site of the Stanhope and Tyne Railway Line at Consett, are a 19th-century theodolite and an engineer’s level, 20 times life size and created from stainless steel. They’re a nod to the area’s industrial history. 

Dream

This 20m tall head on the site of the old Sutton Manor Colliery in St Helen’s, Merseyside,  is coated in white Spanish dolomite, intended as a contrast to the coal that was once mined here. The woman has her eyes closed in peaceful meditation. 

Newton, After Blake

Fittingly perched outside the British Library, Edoardo Paolozzi’s bronze scultpure stands 3.7m high and is mounted on a high plinth, all the better to look out at all the readers and scholars coming and going from the library. 

Silvas Capitalis

A giant head made from larch is not what you’d <expect> to find in a forest, but this one, located alongside the Lakeside Way in Kielder, sort of looks at home. You can clamber inside it and up the stairs to the first floor to look out through its eyes and listen to the sounds of the forest through its ears. 

Read about the rest of our Seven Marvels of Britain in the November issue. And we’d love to hear about any of your own Marvels of Britain. Leave us a note in the comments below.

Buy this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe

More from our blog…

More days out to inspire you…

Unexpected treasures | Outdoor art

From waymarking sculptures on coastal paths to pieces made from the earth itself, outdoor art comes in many and various forms.

GALLERIES IN THE GLADES

Forests can often feel a little like galleries: the hushed atmosphere, the filtered light, the sculptural forms of the branches. It’s no surprise then that several forests have taken this one step further, installing site-specific sculptures, to help us explore and understand the woods and their history. So in the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail, lines of compressed charcoal by Onya McCausland signal underground coal mines, while in Kielder Water and Forest Park in Northumberland, Chris Drury’s Wave Chamber projects the rippling waters of the adjacent lake onto the chamber’s floor.

SCULPTURES BY THE SEA

Summer is often when we head to the coast and, just as many of our seaside towns are now home to impressive art galleries (think Margate and Dundee), so outdoor art has stepped into the limelight. Another Place by Antony Gormley is undoubtedly one of the most haunting works: 100 life-size cast-iron statues “trying to remain standing, trying to breathe,”as Gormley has said, in the shifting sands of Crosby Beach, just north of Liverpool. Due to its size, and therefore the statement it makes, a lot of outdoor art tends to be by well known artists with guaranteed ‘pulling power’ (eg, Maggi Hambling’s Scallop at Aldeburgh). It’s refreshing then to note that the five new waymarking sculptures created for the Gower coastal trail between Mumbles and Rhossili this year are all by lesser-known artists, all women, handcarving in oak.

PARKLIFE PIECES

Purpose-built sculpture parks got going in Britain in the late 1970s with the launch of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the first in the UK and, with more than 500 acres to play with, the largest of its kind in Europe. The rolling open fields provide an expansive backdrop to monumental pieces by Henry Moore, while the landscaped grounds and woods shelter works by a roll call of leading names from Elisabeth Frink to Andy Goldsworthy. Entrance is free, but donations are invited. If it’s site-specific art you’re after, head further north to Jupiter Artland, just outside Edinburgh, where collectors Robert and Nicky Wilson have invited contemporary artists to make new pieces for their 100-acre estate. Highlights include several works by Goldsworthy and Cells of Life by Charles Jencks, in which the earth itself has been sculpted into sinuous, swirling landforms.

Turn to page 64 of July's The Simple Things for more extraordinary and challenging, joyful outdoor art that helps us see the world differently.

Get hold of your copy of this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe

View the sampler here.

More from the July issue:

More summer outings: