“Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it’ s a tool; “I’ll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw”. I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?”
— Banksy
Confession: I’ve got a thing for street art.
If you haven’t noticed that by now—from other posts I’ve done on places like Sasseri, Sardinia, and the northern UK outpost of Manchester—let me briefly explain why. For some reason, I always feel more at home in a town that’s not afraid to let a little color onto its walls.
In a place like Europe (I know, that’s not a vague statement at all), the charming scenes of winding, cobble-stoned alleys can all start to, well, wind into each other a little too much and become hard to tell apart when you look back on your photographs of them. But, if one of those picturesque lanes just happens to have a mural of a Lego-block-like city landscape on it like one such alley wall did in Brighton, it becomes that much more memorable—in my mind at least.
So as I escaped down to my new favorite seaside city last week for an aforementioned bloggers meet-up with Propellernet, I was delighted to find so many walls and storefronts in Brighton had been graced by an artist’s hand.
As my lovely blogging friend Jayne and I explored Brighton’s famous lanes, we were both enchanted with the amount of street art there was to see (check out Jayne’s impressions on her blog, 40 Before 30). Whether it was cartoon renderings of well-known landmarks like the Brighton Royal Pavilion or a somewhat-creepy human skull announcing ‘Life is beautiful,’ these urban depictions were everywhere.
But what I found even cooler was that the artsy vibes didn’t stop with graffiti—from a pair of sneakers slung over a telephone wire in the middle of a North Laine street, to tile mosaics at the threshold of a store, it was hard to walk ten feet and not come across another reason to get my camera out.
And as Banksy himself says, what’s better than being able to tell a friend, “Meet you at the bagel shop opposite the polka dot storefront”?
Thanks again to Propellernet and the Thistle Brighton for the chance to explore their cool seaside city.
Oh, how incredibly creative! I have to think about my favorite street with street art–being that I live in homogeneous Suffolk Virginia!