I want to ride my bicycle, bicycle, bicycle!

This poster, entered into a Traffic for London competition by Kai Nodland, is soo cool.  It represents everything that I love about having a bike – the simple enjoyment of finding your way around an entire city.  Discovering its urban idiosyncrasies on a two-wheel frame.

Here are some more bike-related prints byRalph Stollenwerk.  Simply because they live up to my romantic notions of how a bike should be: old, trustworthy and at home in its urban playground…ahhh I love bicycling!

Two Door Cinema Club – I can talk

Not only does this remind me of SOS 4.8 music festival in Murcia… its so upbeat and happy, this tune cannot help but put a smile on my face 🙂

Can I share your umbrella?

Last week during one of the rare moments of rain and one of those typical moments of “where’s my umbrella when I need it”, I cheekily poked my head under a man’s brolly as we stood at a zebra crossing.  He took it well and we had a 5 min chat, he was funny. 

It was only a moment, but it made us both smile. and that’s nice.

In the rainy climes of the UK we hide under our umbrellas for most of the time.  Where these shields stop us from interacting with our fellow pedestrians , a ‘share my umbrella’ scheme would be a nice start to making a change.  Starting a fundraiser and giving out umbrellas with YOUR WELCOME TO JOIN or something like that printed on them.  A way of making the rain a sociable event, one that is contrary to our huddled mass of heads pointed at the ground under our small, solitary domes.

Florian Nicolle

Crystal Fighters

Favourite band of this year!

Escif

The work of Valencian-based graffiti artist, Escif, is definitely worth a look.  Dotted across Valencia and worldwide, his work is more conceptual than decorative, put there to wake up people’s minds and to force them to question the norms and values of a rigid and corrupt society.

They’re dark and, in many ways, despairing yet they reflect in their very nature the hope of evolution and change, of processes and also of the notion that change is possible.

For Escif, the process of painting allows him to develop ideas and symbols crop up in his work time and again.  Painting is a way of  processing ideas and similarly forcing others to stop, consider and interpret his thoughts… walls feature a lot and as such they highlight the importance of our street walls and of manipulating them to show work that rarely figure on the official agenda of expensive galleries.

” I see graffiti as a necessary symptom of life in contemporary cities. A painted wall represents a way of using the city that is not thought about socially (though it becomes more so every day). It seems very interesting to me that people that live in a city do not settle for using it according to imposed rules; they invent new ways of utilizing it.”

Hojas

Have you wondered how a leaf is so much like you and me?  They’re individuals, changing colour as they mature and grow older, floating about the streets, gathering in collectives or stranded alone.

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A leaf in its prime is like a virginal, blank page… in Spanish they share the same word… hoja.

José Luis Jover

“Something is always superfluous” says José Luis Jover and so it shows with his stunning and refreshingly original collages.  Going somewhere along the lines of Magritte, he takes simple everyday images and places them together to create a totally new visual concept.   Questioning and poking fun at our dulled perceptions of life and the commonplace images of media and advertsing.

Seeking Adventure. Has anyone seen it?

I have to go here one day…

 

Manarola in Cinque Terre, Italy. A mish-mash of primary colours smatter this Italian seaside cliff; a higgledy-piggledy mess of houses piled on top of each other as though dropped there by accident… deep blue water and fishing boats surround them as though in worship.

One to add to the wishlist.