Welcome to the new/updated site, with revisions happening daily! Since 2002, your old-school website for all things stencils. Please consider donating what you can to support the much-needed upgrade. Photo, video, links, and exhibit info submissions always welcome. Enjoy and stay curious.
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Let's hope that 2019 is full of negative space!
Thanks for the submissions! Cheers to: Amanda, Brooklyn Street Art, Hugh, and Josiah.
Photo: Amanda S.
Banksy (just one)
>NEW< stencil legend Peter Kuper
Raf Urban (just one)
Sol (just one)
xoooox (just one)
Battle against taggers makes its mark as San Francisco’s graffiti plague eases
SF Chron (LINK)
Evan Sernoffsky Jan. 4, 2019 Updated: Jan. 4, 2019 4 a.m.
They usually strike at night. Spray can in hand, they scrawl their crude tags on San Francisco’s historic brick facades, business windows and sidewalks.
And when morning reveals the destructive spree of graffiti, the vandals are usually long gone, leaving property owners with a stubborn cleanup job — possibly even a fine.
But thanks to an aggressive new strategy by police and prosecutors, such incidents of vandalism appear to be in decline, according to the latest numbers. Reports of graffiti to 311 have hit an all-time low since the city started tracking the data at the start of 2016.
There were 3,371 such calls in November compared with 7,611 reported during March, according to data provided by the district attorney’s office.
Excerpted from "Peter Kuper: Conversations," edited by Kent Worcester, from a 2009 interview with Kuper by Christopher Irving (pp. 76-77).
Your stencil style: How do you go about doing that?
Kuper: I photocopy my pencil drawings, and then cut a stencil out of the photocopy paper. I spray them with enamel spray paint, not an airbrush, so I can pick up one can, put it down, and then spray another fast.
How did you first arrive at using stencils for comic book art?
Kuper: My lifelong pal, Seth Tobocman turned me on to them. I was looking at an illustration he did this way and it rang my bell. It was apparently a very loud bell, because that was in 1988 and here, to this day, I'm still doing stencils. At this point, I feel like I want to move away from spray paint because of its toxic nature. The irony of doing pieces on our degraded environment using aerosol sprays is too much.
Spy vs. Spy is done in stencils, right?
Kuper: I did it in stencils when they asked me to try out for the job figuring they wouldn't go for it. I didn't want to try to mimic the style of [Antonio] Prohias', I thought that "If I'm going to do this, I'll do something that's different. I thought they'd thank me for my kooky approach, bid me adieu and I'd go on my merry way." When they said, "You got the job," I thought I'd probably just do it for a year. I'm in my thirteenth year of Spy vs. Spy.
Do you do these stenciled comics a panel at a time, or the whole page?
Kuper: I do it a page at a time. I usually spray a base in red and black. I spray the red paint first and then spray the black on top of it, which gives a glow of the red under the black. Occasionally I do more than one stencil per piece, but not that often. I'm experimenting now with rolling or brushing on acrylic paint with a stencil.
Later in the book, Seth Tobocman briefly mentions stencils in the 2014 interview with Steven Heller (p. 100)
Tobocman: I learned about stencils and street art from Anton Van Dalen and Michael Roman....
Early November’s update is here! Thanks to: Amanda, Brooklyn Street Art, and Devin. Today’s vinyl LP work music: The Residents (RIP Hardy Fox) and Classically MAD (1958).
(Photo from up the hill on Turk St., SF)
>NEW< Raf Urban (FR)
Colombia (just one)
Germany (just one)
Indonesia (more ancient cave stencils)
NYC (just one)
Russia (just one)
South Carolina (just one)
Uruguay (just one)
:::::::: SAN FRANCISCO
Financial District (advertisements!)
Upper Haight (just one)
The Richmond (just one)
Artiste autodidacte, né en 1971, il grandit en banlieue sud de Paris, dans les années 80 c’est sous l’influence de la culture urbaine qu’il évolue au contact de l’ambiance de la rue, découvrant le mouvement graffiti et hip hop qui se développe dans les quartiers de la capitale , où il passe beaucoup de temps à découvrir et s’inspirer.
40,000-year-old cave art may be world's oldest animal drawing
The Southeast Asian island of Borneo joins a growing number of sites boasting early cave art innovation.
BY MAYA WEI-HAAS
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 7, 2018 (LINK)
COUNTLESS CAVES PERCH atop the steep-sided mountains of East Kalimantan in Indonesia, on the island of Borneo. Draped in stone sheets and spindles, these natural limestone cathedrals showcase geology at its best. But tucked within the outcrops is something even more spectacular: a vast and ancient gallery of cave art.
Hundreds of hands wave in outline from the ceilings, fingers outstretched inside bursts of red-orange paint. Now, updated analysis of the cave walls suggests that these images stand among the earliest traces of human creativity, dating back between 52,000 and 40,000 years ago. That makes the cave art tens of thousands of years older than previously thought.
But that's not the only secret in the vast labyrinthine system.
In a cave named Lubang Jeriji Saléh, a trio of rotund cow-like creatures is sketched on the wall, with the largest standing more than seven feet across. The new dating analysis suggests that these images are at least 40,000 years old, earning them the title of the earliest figurative cave paintings yet found. The work edges out the previous title-holder—a portly babirusa, or “pig deer,” in Sulawesi, Indonesia—by just a few thousand years.
“In the entrance, there's a little chamber to the right, and it's there—bam,” says archaeologist Maxime Aubert of Griffith University. It's not the earliest cave art ever found. But unlike earlier scribbles and tracings, these paintings are unequivocal depictions of ancient animals, his team reports today in the journal Nature.
The bovines and handprints join a growing array of artwork of similar age that adorns the walls of caves around the world. These paintings mark a shift in how early humans thought about and engaged with their environment—from focusing on survival and daily mundane necessities to cultivating what could be the earliest threads of human culture, explains Paleolithic archeologist April Nowell of the University of Victoria.
“I think for a lot of us, that's a true expression of human-ness in the broadest sense of that word,” she says.
Banksy's shredding prank worked in rehersals, but still punked the elite art-collecting world IRL.
