Last week it was mostly about the Fruit Shop at the Whitecross Street Party, there was time to paint a small piece on a square canvas, nothing is ever square though, nothing is that square. Nothing Is Square is the name of a group show that will happen in November, too early to mention that one yet….

Before the Fruit Shop at Whitecross there was an art drop in Hackney Wick, there haven’t been so many art drops this year, there was 265 last year, there’s been something like two thousand paintings left hang out on streets over the last six or seven years, true there has only been about a dozen this year and yes, people have been complaining, but hey, when you start to expect it then it might just be time for me as an artist to not do the expected? There was an art drop on the old Lord Napier pub, a building that has been dropped on on many times as things have evolved in Hackney Wick. The first time I went to that pub was before Motorhead gig at the old Hackney dog track, it was full of skinheads and Hell’s Angels, that’s a story for another day though. Hackney Wick has always been one of my favourite parts of London, more about that next week, Hackney WickED is coming up at the end of July, if things flow well this week there will hopefully be a new larger painting as part of a group show, more about that next week as well. Here’s that recent leaf left hang on the wall of the old Lord Napier pub

Hackney Wicked, Hackney WickEd, the Whitecross Street Party, the Art Car Boot Fair, the Fruit Shop, the summer is proving to be as busy as every other summer of recent years, not sure how many more East London summers there will be but while we’re here, the paintings produced will hopefully feel like Hackney or the old walls and marks of Hackney..,

The overall feeling at the tenth annual Whitecross Street Party (Whitecross Street, London EC1, July 13th/14th 2019) was exactly that, the feeling of a rather good East End urban art flavoured street party; a street party alive with energetic colour, with lots of fun, alive with art, with music and poetry, a street party alive with people, alive with a whole cross-section of communities and groups all coming together at what is essentially an event that evolves around the many tentacled beast that is street art. the Fruit Shop that appeared at the Art Car Boot Fair in King’s Cross a couple of weeks back, the Fruit Shop that appeared at Shipton Street Gallery over on the edges of Hackney for a couple of weeks back in April, was taking the form of a traditional East End market Stall for the two days of the Whitecross Street Party. We were set up in the middle of the street next to the rather argumentative Labour Party stall for the Saturday and a rather brilliant local church’s history society on the (cricket-fuelled) Sunday – and what a history Whitecross Street has in terms of street markets and lots lots more besides, brilliant history stall run by long-standing informative locals, loads of fascinating conversations and stories shared, brilliant (and I really hadn’t come across the Worrall and Fuller Exhibition Fund until a local vicar came over to ask if I was related to the Worrall in question, I do appear have a name that keeps on cropping up in terms of East London history, have you checked out Worrall’s yard over in Brick Lane?). The Street Party was fun, not everything was brilliant but so much of it was, there’s a review and a whole load of imagery in terms of other artists taking part over on the Organ website –   ORGAN THING: The Whitecross Street Party, a taste or two of what went down last weekend…