Look down.
Sidewalk graffiti; sidewalk stencils.
All photos taken in the Arts District of Los Angeles
below: “Catch your life” on a Pokemon ball
below: Life, and metamorphosis
below: Stikman is in LA too!
below: Not me? and a little moneybags mouse
below: “Paint here and here”
below: Say Yes!
below: Smile for the ego
below: Buy the Lie
Photos taken in 2015
There is a pole, or pipe (downspout?) in Baptist Place, Melbourne, that is covered with many little drawings. They are all slogans or phrases written using music scores as a paper source. I am not sure what songs were used (or if that has any relevance?) but the lyrics are written at least two languages. At the top is “Eat the Rich” .
below: Next comes “Resist”. I was curious about what song was in the background, so I checked google translate – “qui quae-runt” is Latin for “those who run”.
below: … and then “Riots not Diets”
below: “Mad Pride”
below: “Alt Right Delete”, but now the lyrics are in English and include “the water” and “somersaults”
below: “Fat so?” with more lyrics like “averte mala” and “tu a disperde”
below: “Cats Rule” in bright colours.
below: The bottom paste-up has the number 13 written above the number 12. Is this a hint as to who the artist is?
Photos taken February 2025
While walking around the old part of Vieste, an Italian town on the Adriatic coast, I spotted three paste-up collages by Demetrio Di Grado, his “Frammenti Sparsi” (Scattered Fragments)
below: In each collage there were old black and white photos of people with words covering their eyes. This one has not survived very well. I am not sure what word obscures the girl’s eyes (my Italian is not good enough) and it appears that she was not alone in the beginning.
below: Put it all together to get “Cambiate le vostre idee ma conservate i vostri principi.” (Change your ideas but keep your principles).
below: Combining spray paint and collage, “odiao amarmi” – They hate to love me. The little girl in the collage has lost her words, once they were “amano odiarmi” – The love to hate me.
Di Grado’s artwork was part of the local Collateral Maris Festival in September 2022.
Photos taken February 2024
A title that succinctly describe this scene:
below: “Creed” by Chilean artist Inti
A woman, Madonna-like? or in a Muslim head scarf?….. holding an olive branch which is a symbol of peace, but she’s wearing an ammo belt around her waist.
Aurora refers to the buildings covered in the brightly coloured stripes, a work by the Spanish artist collective Boa Mistura. It includes the test, “In het hart van elke winter leeft een trillende lente” which translates to “In the heart of every winter lives a vibrating spring”. The artwork covers 228 apartment units and is probably the largest mural in Europe.
In front of the apartment complex is a large 3-D sign spelling the name of the city, Heerlen. When it was first installed, it was orange. Now it has been enhanced with some DazeTwo ravens and crows at one end ….
…. and the ending letters were decorated by Amber Delahaye with other elements from nature such as mushrooms, butterflies, and flowers.
NOTE: The quote on the buildings is taken from one by Kahlil Gibran which says: “In every winter’s heart there is a quivering spring, and behind the veil of each night there is a smiling dawn”
Photos taken October 2023
More Heerlen murals were in the previous post, “more Heerlen birds”
between Manhattan and Williamsburg, over the East River
A little yellow dinosaur trying to look fierce as he growls at your feet.
I’m happy you’re here, keep going!
I crave you
Shy white cat says meow
Homesick and Lucky Star writ large on a grey wall. The American flag image below them is made using painted car doors.
It’s just love in a rainbow of colours.
… and love is gold
Pacman wears a gold crown, king of the streets
Looking down at Williamsburg streets including a mural with two faces and two flowers.
Blackface pink walker
Reaching out in peace and love
Stencil by go4tart aka GOAT, rat on a scooter; a rat loves NYC
Seek Discomfort
Sold out art show yellow face with three pairs of eyes.
I wonder what Jane’s reaction was?
….. Maybe this is Jane ?!
on the railing – mask? and master?
Kiss me
More words on love
… but in the end, the virus gets you.
Photos taken August 2023
On Montreal’s rue Ontario, close to rue Moreau and the railway tracks, there is a long brick building close to the sidewalk. At one end there is a painting of a squirrel with an object in his little front paws. This nut shaped object has a label that says Courrier Plus which turns out to be a trucking/transportation company and the owner of the building on which the mural is painted.
The rest of the mural features a red fire hydrant, a pigeon and a toucan with a beak in rainbow colours.
Murals in the central part of the city. Some old and some new.
below: Conor Harrington headless duellng men, or one man against himself?
below: It looks like a small blue whale inside a larger transparent whale. It’s called “Detecting Machine” and it was painted by Nevercrew, a pair of artists, Pablo Togni and Christian Rebecchi.
below: Be stronger than your excuses, under the bridge
below: Be yourself, everyone else is already taken
below: ‘The Giant Storybook Project’ by Herakut, painted Oct. 2012, on St. Paul Street
All pictures taken May 2023 except the bottom photo which is from 2015. The mural is still there but I didn’t take another picture of it when I was in Rochester a couple of months ago.
;
below: Some sort of art?
below: And another some art
below: Recycle yourself
below: He sits behind the glass.
below: Green hair, teal hair.
below: Rube stork in black and white
below: Trump as purple clown. Maybe the colour suits him!
below: The world in red and white.
below: Two faces and an arrow
below: Ouvre les yeux. La vie est belle/ bleue. Open your eyes, life is beautiful.
below: Not my World Cup … protesting the 2022 World Cup (football) being held in Dubai.
below: Priority mail
below: A cute little couple by Costah (aka Nuno Costah)
below: Grey Putas 
below: Love is blue
below: Question authority?
below: “A veces el cambio se siente como en arcoiris est blanco y negro” roughly translates from Spanish to English as “Sometimes the changes feel like the rainbows are black and white.”
below: On an old wall
below: Monkeys with weapons
below: … and a red mushroom
below: Fox under red
below: Batman!
below: Yes, it’s just a chicken. If you are wondering why I took a picture of a sticker with a chicken on it, you are not alone. I think that the couple walking behind me, who stopped to look at the pole too, were also confused!
below: One frog, two frog; green frog, red frog (doesn’t quite rhyme does it?)
below: Love and suicide and a question that is fraught with complications
below:Keep smiling … until next time!
Photos taken February 2023
Stencils, stickers, and small paste ups around Vienna
below: You don’t have to look like this
below: K2m Cactus is feeling blue – I can Imagine is ici (or is it Incredible Crew of Invaders?) – and someone’s wearing a gas mask.
below: Skateboarder, diva, and 2 lit lighters. Let’s scream.
below: Fishman doesn’t seem to like his metamorphosis. I have questions – how does he breathe? How does his hair stay in place?
below: Screaming in anger and frustration “Nothing I do matters while Capitalism exists. “
below: Comment on the Patriarchy
below: With a touch of green
below: Mouse with an umbrella or at least I think that it’s a mouse. Such a ballsy behind.
below: Eyes – blue eyes on red and one eye almost hidden behind a mask and torn paper.
below: Stickers on blue
below: More stickers and paint on sign
below: Oh my! A sorry yellow ghost – he doesn’t look very sorry does he?
below: Frauhans
below: Little green happy faces plus translation surprises: Weihnacht hatte angst aber Ostern hat eier!! = Christmas has fear but Easter has eggs. Why do people choose the words they write?
below: While a blue Rick Astley claims that he’s never gonna give you up others are waiting for something to happen even though something is waiting behind you.
below: Forked tongue, sluglike hugs on a pole. We all need a little TLC.
below: Big theater, little applause. The curtain drew back and revealed that the world is on the stage. All the world’s a stage…..
Before the second World War, about one quarter of the population of Kaunas LIthuania was Jewish – about 30,000 people. Known in Yiddish as Kovno, it was a city As part of the City Telling Festival (Istoriju Festivalis) in 2020 a couple of large murals were painted in memory of a few of these people. This festival was one of the events leading up to 2022 where Kaunas was one of the “European Capitals of Culture”
below: Leja (or Leah) Goldberg, b. 1911, poet. It was painted by Lithuanian artist Linas Kaziulionis and it measures 15 by 10 meters. The text is one of her poems “Oren” (Pine) written in Hebrew and Lithuanian.
Goldberg was the daughter of Abraham and Cilia Goldberg. Her father was an economist at an insurance company before WW1. During the Great War (i.e. WW1), most of the Jews were “evacuated” from Lithuania and sent to the interior of Russia. Lea was three years old when the family was forcibly deported from Kaunas. When they returned after the war and the defeat of Germany, Lea’s father was tortured by Lithuanian soldiers who accused him of being a Communist. He died before Lea emigrated to Palestine in 1935; her mother followed her the next year.
One translation of the poem:
Here I will not hear the voice of the cuckoo.
Here the tree will not wear a cape of snow.
But it is here in the shade of these pines
my whole childhood reawakens.
The chime of the needles: Once upon a time –
I called the snow-space homeland,
and the green ice at the river’s edge –
was the poem’s grammar in a foreign place.
Perhaps only migrating birds know –
suspended between earth and sky –
the heartache of two homelands.
With you I was transplanted twice,
with you, pine trees, I grew –
roots in two disparate landscapes.
below: Another mural with a poem that was also part of the same festival. It was painted by Tadas Vincaitis-Plūgas. The is mural dedicated to another Jewish family that lived in Kaunas before WW2.
The words are those of Hirsh Ošerovičius (1908-1994) written in 1964. The text is in Lithuanian but one English translation is:
Ah, do you really believe,
Oblivion has the final say in what is to be forgotten?
For it is often only an image from the ashes rising
And stand in flesh, in full reality
Forever framed for every day to come.
The mural depicts a mother, Greta, and her daughter Rosian Bagriansky. Rosian was born in 1935 in Kaunas. Her father, Paul (or Polis) Bagriansky, was a textile merchant and her mother was a concert pianist and music teacher. Rosian survived the Holocaust after her parents dug a hole next to the fence of Kaunas Ghetto and pushed Rosian through it and into the hands of one of their former employees, Bronė Budreikaitė. Rosian became Irena Budreikaitė
Eyes on the Streets 