July 4, 2017

Colourful photos of bike crates and old graffiti

Filed under: Art,Photography by Orangemaster @ 2:38 pm

Bike-crate-AMS

Although these crates can be found on bikes all over the country, these ones on instagram are from Amsterdam. The gallery features milk creates, supermarket crates, baskets and wooden boxes, to name but a few of the creative ways people kit out their bikes. As opposed to other western countries, the Dutch are more about dumping their bags and groceries in the front crate than cycling with a backpack.

And then across the country in Nijmegen, Paul de Graaf took pictures of the 30 odd years of graffiti peeled off the sides of punk rock venue Doornroosje, with a cool timeline from 1984 until today. He says it is a lot like the rings of a tree. Besides having the biggest names in music play there, Doornroosje is also known as one of the first places in the country that openly sold sold marijuana and hash.

Graffiti-Doornroosje

(Links: instagram.com , imgur.com)

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April 11, 2016

Football fans duking it out with graffiti

Filed under: Art,Sports by Orangemaster @ 12:48 pm

Fans of Rotterdam football club Feyenoord and fans of FC Utrecht are entangled in a graffiti competition that involves dissing each other using street art. This video shows Bokito eating an army of gnomes, and there’s a whole bunch of other graffiti on film that was spotted in and around Rotterdam.

Another work of graffiti has Feyenoord Ollie, a spherical grey elephant, covering gnomes in pooh, apparently a response to some graffiti in Utrecht where a big Ollie is being attacked by an army of gnomes.

Bokito the gorilla made world news some years ago after attacking a woman at a zoo in Rotterdam, which seems fitting. The gnomes from Utrecht are drawn by KBTR, which sounds like ‘kabouter’, the Dutch word for gnome, many of which can be seen in Utrecht and in other parts of the country.

We used a KBTR picture only because last time we used a Bokito picture, we were almost sued out of existence.

(Link: www.rijnmond.nl, Photo by Aarnoot, some rights reserved)

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October 23, 2014

Banksy makes his own Vermeer in Bristol

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 10:06 am

Bristol, UK now has their very own ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ revisited by Banksy and called ‘Girl with the Pierced Eardrum’, which has already been defaced. The earring is an alarm box.

(Link: www.independent.co.uk, Photo of Banksy’s Cleaner by Dan Brady, some rights reserved)

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October 22, 2012

Utrecht’s gnome artist KBTR has a new graffiti book

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 11:53 am

Trendbeheer’s Niels Post got a sneak preview last week of the KBTR book, a photo book of Utrecht’s best known graffiti artist.

The 160-page full-colour book will be published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies and will only be sold at The Revenge in Utrecht as of 27 October. Price: 45 euro. Says the official announcement: “The publication is not a historical work of reference, but an autonomous art project.”

See also: Utrecht graffiti artist KBTR, the new Keith Haring?

(Photo by Trendbeheer/NP, some rights reserved)

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November 17, 2011

‘Knitting graffiti’ wins best neologism for 2011

Filed under: Art,General by Orangemaster @ 1:32 pm

The Dutch verb ‘wildbreien’ (literally ‘wild knitting’, but really meaning ‘knitting graffiti’) was chosen as the neologism (new word) of 2011. Instead of something negative or lowbrow, knitting graffiti should makes us all feel warm and fuzzy inside. I know I did when I snapped pictures of it in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district. It is also referred to as ‘straatbreien’ (‘street knitting’) because it livens up the streets.

If only it could keep them warm.

(Link: inl.nl)

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February 1, 2011

Utrecht graffiti artist KBTR, the new Keith Haring?

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 12:46 pm

The past years these depictions of angry gnomes have been popping up all over Utrecht, and now people are comparing the artist’s work to that of the Keith Haring.

The artist goes by the name KBTR, ‘kabouter’ with the vowels taken out. Kabouters are a type of gnome typical for the Netherlands which look like garden gnomes or like original depictions of leprechauns, i.e. fellows with pointy hats and long flowing beards but not to be confused with “hipsters” or “freds”.

As the video shows, one guy managed to get two private kabouters by leaving a couple of crates of beer and a mention of when he would be away on holiday at a local bike shop. More of KBTR’s work can be seen at streetfiles.org. To me, the kabouters of KBTR have a distinct likeness to Belgium’s angry cartoon gnome Kabouter Wesley.

(Photo by Aarnoot, some rights reserved)

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July 16, 2010

Bureaucrats want to remove commissioned wall graffiti

Filed under: Architecture,Art by Orangemaster @ 3:11 pm
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An entire year after having been commissioned by the City of Amsterdam, a wall graffiti with annexed garden downtown on the Prinsengracht by The London Police apparently has to be painted over, as it doesn’t ’embellish’ the area of downtown Amsterdam it is in. Nonsense!

Seasoned Amsterdam residents know that this bit of nannyism is bureaucrat code for ‘we’re still trying to get Amsterdam on the Unesco list and this probably won’t help’.

Why was it put up in the first place? Why take one year to devalue something you’ve ordered? Who complained about it? Does it have something to do with Amsterdam’s new, slightly more conservative mayor Eberhard van der Laan? Was someone bored at work?

Funny, Miami, New York, Munich and other big cities around the world have no problems with their London Police wall graffiti at all.

(Link: parool, Photo of Graffiti by London Police by Pierrot, some rights reserved)

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September 19, 2008

Dutch graffiti artist looking at jail time

Filed under: Art,General by Orangemaster @ 8:50 am
Krae

Authorities in New York City have indicted a resident of the Netherlands who came there a ‘graffiti tourist’. According to the International Herald Tribune, US justice officials have issued an arrest warrant for Dutch resident Robbert Boxem, 23, from Zwolle who allegedly went to New York for the international graffiti event Meeting of Styles. He has been indicted on charges of spray painting a subway car and leading police on a dangerous chase, which occurred down the subway tracks! Boxem (aka KRAE) now faces charges of criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. The paper says the 23-year-old from Zwolle could get up to four years in prison if convicted. The warrant was issued on Thursday after he failed to turn up in court.

That’s one way to draw attention to yourself. Terribly insightful comments made on the gothamist site (here below) include, “Dutch art has really taken a dive since the days of Van Gogh, Vermeer and Rembrandt” and “He must have gotten tired of running around in wooden shoes and sticking his finger in dykes.”

(Links: gothamist.com, dutchnews.nl, Photo: duncancumming)

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April 19, 2008

Reverse graffiti embraced by advertisers

Filed under: Art,Fashion by Branko Collin @ 11:04 am

Reverse graffiti is a delightfully provocative art form that works by selectively cleaning the grime off a city’s walls and streets (and by writing “clean me” on the back of vans). It has city governments the world over racking their brains over how to prosecute the perpetrators—how are you going to punish the people that clean your city for you? But officials need not worry much longer because they’re getting help from an unlikely source: the business world. The Dutch version of women’s magazine Elle has started a reverse graffiti campaign to advertise its wares. Surely no self-respecting artist will touch reverse graffiti now that it has been tainted by commercialism?

Elle’s “artists”—in a presumed rush to get as much work done as possible—are using stencils and pressure washers to clean parts of the pavement.

Photos: stills from Elle’s promotional video. See also: reverse graffiti by Moose (UK) and by Alexandre Orion (Brasil). Via Dagelinks (Dutch).

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