On The Design Boat

Sunday, 24 August 2014

S T R E E T A R T - E n e r g i z i n g s p a c e s

Ever experienced boredom while walking down a street; using the same route everyday to reach a destination; seeing the same trees, buildings & people?

I rarely do - there is so much activity in a city like Mumbai to keep one absorbed at every step, every turn.

This city always seems to be on the move - people churning in and out of railway stations; food vendors & street merchants peddling their wares in front of glitzy showrooms; a never ebbing flow of vehicles occupying every inch of available roads; toy vendors on traffic signals, flower traders everywhere on festivals - there is much to see, smell and desire on any day out.

However, I would absolutely not mind encounters of the kind we bring to you today :) Encounters that immediately bring a smile to your face, lighten the mood and make you say 'wow'!

Presenting street art by Oakoak

A well known street artist from Saint Etienne, France, Oakoak uses the simplest everyday elements as interventions to create graffiti that is at once appealing & so appropriate to the space it is created on :

Be it this railing end

Or, this patch of peeled off paint, so imaginatively depicted as a mill.

"I like this city, her atmosphere" OakOak says of Saint Etienne "and I wanted it to look nicer. It was an industrial city with many coal mines; now it's in regeneration and still quite poor. But it's easily travelled by foot with awkward aspects ideal for art. I saw shapes everywhere, and wanted to realise them." www.theoutsiders.net