Wallpaper paste and posters EVERYWHERE

I know that promises and [bli:p] are a tricky one to combine, at least the part of actually keeping it. We've had some crashes of tees, studio pieces and ideas, but mostly Street Action. You see - this baby has been nagging me ever since those stencil std word-based cliche's came along, but the problem has always been the same - I have never known graff people who could paste along with me on a daily basis. Some people interested in the process have come along, but we never truly got to that part of us lurking the shadows of Riga at night. Until now.
 Usually when I post a statement, it goes something like this - 'street action planned! stay tuned!'. Promising as it may seem, but that's not a sentence to rely on - a true bomb trip has a date, people and pieces ready to be pasted. Always. So - 22. of August, at least 2 people accompanying me and 7 types of wheatpastes to be pasted. We've found our distinctive style and the street art type to spread. Now it's time for action. The plan is to paste 50 - 75 wheatpastes all around Riga at the night from 22. to 23. Such magnificent pieces as 'You and me', '[bli:p]', never before seen 'stand-art' and 'depth lies within the viewer' and many others will be made in a few days time, as there is a whole week for preperations. Getting to the paper shop tomorrow, spraying the pieces the day after tomorrow + making the last Cargoh related stuff. Detailed blog coming your way, as always when we get to do something of a studio-ush kind.




We're finally getting there.
[bli:p]

The truth about minimalism and the modern ‘minimartist

 To be quite clear – minimalism is the bitch of all the art forms there are. Not only has it usually gained the most attention by using the least detail… The ‘clean’ feel of anything under the humongous slogan of minimart is based on everything other in the world. The enjoyers of minimalism (and there are a hell of a lot of them) are tired of the ‘colorful warfare’ out there, so they seek for a relief for their tired eyes. Completely clean colors, drawings and even text, literally supported by every overused thing there is in the world. Now that’s the ultimate outsourcing.

 The ‘man behind the canvas’ is something of the same, but different kind. Although they have the ability to use the least physical materials/work to make something look profound, the thought behind the process needs to be as clear as possible. The truth is that minimalism is not a free-pass for creating something original. It’s not something with the least elements possible, no composition, color schemes or a thought behind it. I mean – it’s still an art form, isn’t it? It can be bad, it has its’ rules to fit in and the dos and don’ts. It still needs talent, work and education both to create and rate. The truth is – sometimes it can take even more time and effort than something that may look very visually detailed and colorful. Take a look at the most of the classic minimalists out there – Rothko for instance created layers, layers and layers of paint to create the powerful feeling of the visual force, a composition of color can raise. His works are the complete maximalism of the feeling, somehow fitted in the slogan of minimalism. And that satisfies me the most. You see - ideas have a certain style, direction and feel to it and usually have a complete ‘antonym’ to them – for instance the before mentioned minimalism and maximalism. Two completely unrelated ways of thinking, related with the thickest bond possible.

 To understand this perfectly, we must get to the roots. A work of art can present different ways of enjoyment – classic oil paintings were a satisfaction to both eyes and soul, as the huge body of work, immense details and realistic scenes presented the emotion the artist had intended to present. The work, put in the making of the painting, simply shone through the canvas, giving you the indescribable feel of profound quality. The modern movement of street art, particularly the people I like to call ‘intellectual street artists’ (By this I mean the people who present a certain thought through the painting on the wall, not just the before mentioned feeling of liking the painting because of the composition, colors etc etc – Banksy, for instance) present a different completely different mind satisfaction. Art is now used as the weapon to strike the minds of the citizens, presenting thoughts through the least materials possible.

 Because of that, minimalism is vital for people like Banksy, Mobstr and many others, including the street art persona I’m trying to become. This kind of art doesn’t need immense details or rich colour palette to support its’ needs. Street art can now present the thought that needs to be provoked, thus actual physical detail becomes useless. And that right there was the ‘why’ that called me into stenciling in the first place. The innovation of this paradox was the thing I was searching for.

 But again – art has too many subfolders to choose from and the options of how to present the chosen style. Creating minimalism can not ask for actual manpower, as it may need very less of the elements a classic painting deserves. So, if used correctly, it can be a simple work of mind. I could spent hours of developing ideas, reshaping them and making them sound, look, feel and think great. I love the moment when a sentence carries the thought from one person to another, maintaining the clear thought the artist had put in it. It’s awesome to see people interpreting the idea to their own understanding, getting out something completely different from it, than I had wanted them to get. And minimalism is the only way to do it. For an idea to travel from person to person, it needs to be as clear as possible, both physically and mentally. It needs to be clear, unharmed by the colourful warfare out there. That’s just the most effective way to do it.

 But really – art has been deconstructed enough by the people too lazy to actually create it. It doesn’t need a why to create, creativity is never about the reason. Emotions don’t need to be explained to make them work. They just need to be out there, on the walls for people to see them, feel them and think them. We just need more art.

[bli:p]

Let's just do this

 As already stated, my computer broke down in quite a stupid way. The screen went so dark I couldn’t see [bli:p], so an external display was needed. It took time to buy the freaking cable and to find all the possible cheap solutions plus the internet was down for a long time, so let’s just say I’ve made enough excuses to last until I go cold. So – I worked a lot on the theoretical scheme of the Grand Cargoh Opening. I still can’t believe I haven’t sorted out this yet… The point is there is so little to be done it’s actually quite weird I haven’t done it already – I just need to get a valid credit card (Apparently maestros don’t do the thing on the internetz) and get myself a paypal account, which redirects to the first matter. And yes – the free ad space canvas is going to be remade, some new slap designs printed/or sprayed and the whole [bli:p] persona swapped around a bit. Needs something of a money-ish kind, but I’m pretty sure I still have some lying around on the floor of my 200 m2 gilded studio.

 As for the slaps. After making that rather blind statement in the last blog post, things went pretty bad. The stencil had to be so small it got to be impossible to cut the letters, caps clogged, cans ended, paper was torn etc etc etc… You wouldn’t want to buy the thing I had at the end of the day, mainly because of the immense detail I had planned, but didn’t have the skill to actually maintain. And do believe me – 528 letters, when gapped and fitted in a 30X20 cm area, is way over anything I’ve ever done before. Even if I did make the slaps hand sprayed, they’d cost a fortune just because of the huge body of work I’d have to put in it. I mean – in the end you wouldn’t even give a [bli:p] over the medium of the work – hand sprayed or printed slaps are almost the same, the hand sprayed just being more expensive and frankly not even nearly as qualitative. So – the idea was really charming, but the actual process of creating appeared to not exactly meet the possibilities of one trying to keep the prices as low as possible. So basically -  the whole question of hand sprayed and printed was truncated down to the plain matter of fitting the needs of the idea. Each type of sticker needs a different kind of appeal to it, so slaps as the smaaaaaaaaaaaaaal (about 6cmX1.5cm) free ad space would be impossible and meaningless to hand make, but a Delta X slap would definitely ask for a unique appeal 100% of the time. (I hope you get why, the description of the idea hasn’t yet formulated, but the basis is quite simple and I believe understandable to anybody who has ever been exposed to physics.) But feel free to give me a shout if you have a different perspective on this thing – I’ll be more than pleased to make an exclusive package of hand-sprayed stickers just for you…

 Keeping up the revisions – my new notebook has went from blank to [bli:p]-ing [bli:p] awesome. The looks of the thing just makes me want to do this to every notebook I will ever have in my life – the cover is hand-made by me and has been attached to the back of the pack of the 200 pages with spray adhesive, allowing me to write stuff on the cover in a beautiful, yet minimalistic way. May not sound as good as it looks – recycled 200 gsm cardboard just can’t be evaluated blindly. But back to the case – the content of the notebook is just as exciting. We’ve created heaps of new ways of [bli:p]-ing, the two most exciting explained below.

 By the fact that you’re actually reading this, I assume you’ve noticed the changes around the InvadingSAM main page. Mainly the header. The colour scheme was something like this a while before and it was changed after a friend of mine suggested it to me. At the time it seemed a pretty good idea to do, but now that I’ve found the magnificent idea of ‘vandalizing dictionaries’, this one seemed to go with it the best. This is like the millionth time I swap [bli:p] around here, so just go ‘meh’ and pretend it’s been like this all the time.

 And THE thing - “[BLI:P] [BLI:P] raaaaaaaaaawr my name needs to be capped and fitted everywhere” has transformed into a simple [bli:p], pasted onto the wall by a (and this feels terribly exciting) brush and some wheatpaste. Yes my dear friends – we’ve gone from stencils to wheatpaste and it just seems to go better and better every time around. For people not familiar with this kind of  street art – the main difference between a stencil and a wheapaste is the fact that the stencil is used to make a picture directly onto the wall by a spray paint, but a wheatpaste is an already printed, or in our case sprayed, poster which, when applied to wall and glued from every possible side, creates a picture of contrast, speaking directly with the spectator. Obey is considered to be the king of the kings, but people like swoon and Krisjanis (Latvian artist, being the first to put something of that kind up on Riga’s’ walls just last fall) are keepin’ the game pretty high up. Google the first two and you’ll see the greatness of it all. My slogans needed an environment to plunge into without being overcast by the rain, making the wall wet thus three times darker. I needed contrast and completely esthetic space free from everything else, thus being able to collide with the city’s dirty walls even better. I needed white paper and dark Alte Haas low-cap letters with no bridge bits, no comas, no dots, no nothing, but the thought provoked by the few words there are. Needless to say it needs practice – the next weeks shall be spent buying and boiling different kinds of glues and testing them out on heaps of different papers, and this shall probably end me up in the last day of summer, wondering how the hell am I going to fit studies with street art, but in the end it will finally bring me to finding a distinctive style of my own not just mentally, but visually too. For now though everything I do is mainly around the GCO, but after something starts coming in from the Cargoh’s side, every tiny bit of my attention is going to be all about STREETS. ‘cause that’s what I am, right?

Anyways – this has already become the longest blog I’ve written, so let’s not make the internet suffer more than it already does.

Cheers