sometime you get to the wall and you realize that the scaffolding you put up is not tall enough

- problem - the artist might get nervous

solution: call the guy with the cherry pickers. realize that there is no way in for such a big car, destroy the wall of the neighbours while they sleep, get in with the van

the artist start painting or, as in this case, pasting up a huge picture. it all goes back to normal

you’re on the elevator assisting him and you start hearing a lady screaming from very far away, she has to be the owner of the wall we teared down and she’s coming to kick our asses

- problem - the artist might get worried

solution: you go down fast, you study the subject really quickly and find the right words to cheer her up with the promise that you’ll put the wall up again when the work is done

the pasting goes on and it all feels good again…that’s when you realize you’re an idiot and you measured the wall wrong, the picture printed by the artist wont reach the other end of the wall and it will look like shit

- problem - the artist might start to seriously hate you

solution: you go to the printing place in town to make some more strips

it’s at the shop that you figure out that their printer sucks, and the prints are looking really bad, the toner is not making it and there are white lines everywhere. this is the point where you’ve already done too much mess, it cant get worst then this and whatever comes up, it will have to work

- problem - the artist is outside waiting for you and fighting himself not to beat you up

solution: you correct the strips with a black marker and pretend it’s all cool

only in the very end of all this tragedy, you can finally go to the blog and post pictures of another great piece of art:

this is the very first picture pasted by JR which was not shot by him, it was shot somewhere in russia and pasted here, it talks about a problem that, unfortunately, has no possible improvised solutions. this is part of Jr new big scale project called “unframed”, more infos here

thanks a lot to federico who passed by occasionally on a saturday morning and ended up destroying the wall with us, antonio for his support with the cherry picker at the last second, gregorio and peppo for helping building the wall again and Jr for being an authentic gentleman and keeping a smile on his face from the beginning to the end of all this mess.

bastardilla is an extremely talented artist coming from Bogota, Colombia.
she’s been working hard here keeping her aesthetic and humor intact even under a very stressed atmosphere. we’ll be opening the group show in town in less then a month and she have been cheering us up a lot making it easier everyday.

i wanted to do a wordplay about this thing that she use glitter that reflect light in her paintings wich often carry deep meaning that would make us reflect upon it. then i realised it would have been too cheasy and just thought to show you some pictures

too bad computer sucks and you cant really see how this glitter shines at night

it’s more visible on these screenprints we’ve been doing

she did more walls

and threw up some nice little pieces here and there, look at this one carefully

she finished this one yesterday

all this happened in only ten days and, for how unbelievable it migt sound, it’s just part of what she has been painting here, big, big up for bastardilla

on another note, if you were thinking to come to the opening and you live far away, my suggestion is to book your flights right now! just do it!

fame festival is curated and financed by studiocromie. studiocromie is a screenprinting studio where most of the artist involved in the festival improvise crazy screenprints.

a 31 handpulled colors print cant really be improvised but i’m sure it’s the craziest thing we could do in southern italy during august.

we loved it!

when i say “we” i usually mean me and Martina, being the only other charter member of the studio she’s super faithful and sweet,  she doesnt help much though…

luckily, and here comes the big news, i could count on the help of the new and untiring production assistant!

her name is Madalena and she came from portugal to help putting the festival up, it’s only thanks to her support and her crazy prayers

that we were able to get these beauties done

by the way, the image comes from a painting by Dalek. it will be available on a very limited edition at the show opening and here on september 25th

him and his wife were on their 70s’ and they were both beautiful and sweet. it was a breath of fresh air to hang out with them on their roof and a pleasure to hear all their stories. as soon as we were finished being hosted by such a lovely couple we were all in a great mood and we decided to go and paint an illegal wall

it was inexplicably easy to paint it and nobody was bothering us until this random guy popped out of nowhere screaming at us that we fucked his car with paint! now, true that he was not good at talking as he could only scream (IMAGINE IF YOU COULD JUST WRITE IN CAPITAL LETTERS) but the guy was a true genius at physics! he had stipulated a innovative theory of winds - in situ - wich asserts that a gust of wind, if well pissed off, can carry a drop of paint and keep it intact for more then 30mt if there is a new Audi to hit on the other end of the road! the situation was turning into a real nightmear and his 20 friends were encouraging him to get fisical to defend his brand new theory…what a weird nightmear was that, there is really no point in me telling this story if not to post this video from spike lee’s “do the right thing” wich illustrates it so well i had to introduce it properly:

too bad we had no faults here and our twin story didnt have the same happy ending spike wrote for his movie… it ended up with me paying the repairment of the car off the glorious festival budget to make sure we could get over it soon and we wouldnt get our ass kicked by an equipe of 20 unsuspected physics in caps lock mode on…
anyway, word to mother finished the wall

and all the crew moved to the studio, where he could create an insanely beautiful work of crafts for his installation at the gallery

and get us busy on a lovely screenprint wich he handfinished with watercolors later (it will be available here soon)

this one above is the last piece he did downtown. we could hear people upstairs eating and watching tv while their old rusted metal panel downstairs was baing carefully painted. this, togheter with the thousands preciousness of the man himself is the thing i love the most about Word To Mother, he’s always looking at weird bits around, he’ll stare at things that you’ve passed by everyday for years but you’ve never actually seen them.

i guess it’s a way to reveal the beauty of unnoticed things, make you realize about their existance as single objects and finally make you wonder about their history. they’ve probably been there since way longer then you have and you’ve just assumed them as part of the setting. personally, i take it as a chance to explore every little piece of the landscape we’re in, to get to know it better and, eventually, to love it more.

she did three walls, this huge one was in a weird spot, the road was bloked off and we had to fuck with fences all the time to get in

luckily, everybody in the neighbourhood was super kind and into the painting so that nobody called the police, they were offering us drinks and food all the time and they all helped us a lot. once she finished this one, we decided to go for this smaller and totally illegal one

she painted it in just two days and again, all the people in the district were really happy and friendly, they would come down with cold drinks and chat to us, commenting this or that piece and showing great partcipation

i guess i can say that people in Grottaglie are finally realizing what this all is about, we’re just doing beautiful paintings around, there are still dickheads who would bother us but we’re definitely going in the right direction here. that makes me happy

a huge thank you to lucy for being so cool all the time and to claudia and her family for helping us and offering us so much support at the big wall.

now, to go back on the artists pulling out topic, it’d be nice for everybody to finally realize that there is no point being jealous at artists, it just looks like they are more free then we all are but that’s a massive lie!
few of them are, few others could be, but for my personal experience, most of them are as work-slaves as we all are.
the best thing in being an artist is that you’re doing what you like to do all the time, but sometimes you have a boss as everybody else, your gallerists, the art market, they’ll drive you crazy if you’re not able to walk back and think. you can even get as far as seeing yourself as your own boss and wow, that’s the point where you should start hating yourself

to get to a point, i’d say that the only way artists are more free then the rest of the world is through this weird common idea that an artist is an artist and as an artist he/she can be crazier then the rest of us, which translate in: i’m an artist, i can do what i want, i will fuck with you all.
yeah right, fuck it!

Travelouge from MOMO on Vimeo.

and some more pictures from Os Gemeos’ muñecos invasion

this last one scared the owner of the place but makes everybody else smile

i’ll come back soon with pictures from lady Mclauchlan

well i guess Sam3’s work does not really belong to mathematics, so i’d better let it speak for itself first

now, i remember the very first time i bumped into his work online. at the time, i was thinking that he could not draw, i thought it didn’t matter how hard he was trying to make it look good, there always was something wrong in the anatomy of his shadows and what i was seeing just looked like a poor “good drawing” try to me. i also thought that the use of his monochrome figures was a necessity rather then a choice. stupid me, i suddenly realized how much of a dumb internet surfer i had been, not paying enough attention and looking at his website between three or four other random windows, evil facebook included.

it was watching his animations that i finally figured that whatever he does is inscribed (to borrow a term from math) into his very specific and solid aesthetic, humor and style. moreover, the guy can actually draw very well!
he’ll probably hate me for saying so, but sam3 is definitely the most romantic artist i’ve ever met, that’s why he does not need accademic anatomy or other colors than just black and white. he just needs to go and do it

in only 10 days he did these two walls above, he worked hard with ceramics

and he did an animation based on his deep studies of the solar year and equinoxes in which a wall painting interacts with the shadow of a drawing in the same way just once a year, on the 21st of june, also known as the summer solstice day.

and so on and on…

this said, i will tell you how funny he can get while he collects wood from the trash can and the trash workers show up dressing the same colors, confuse him for one of them and trhow his woods into the trash truck,

i will show you how he enjoys going around to make some quick pieces involving local street kids (this guy below is the very famous tic & tic)

and i will tell you about that night that he made everybody happy with his tasty home cooked paella

what about a little thin advert now here?

you can BUY “Sombras” here, a book here containing a selection of sam3 works from the last 4 years here. you dont even have to bother reading it here, it just contains nice pictures !

here very special offer for this week only : BUY 1, GET 1!  here

talk soon here!

and here

i’ve been in love with his work since the very same moment i came to know about it and even if i knew it was going to be very different from the usual FAME figurative aesthetic i’ve never had any doubts: he rocks! i also had the feeling that he would have liked weird walls better then flat white walls… what i did not know is that he would have gone for these impossible to paint surfaces,

that he would have liked to interact with pre-existent graffiti weirdness

and that he also had advanced gardening skills to rely on…

after filling a full sketchbook

he also found time to paint a big fresh wall in the heart of the ceramic district

and only after me and the guy with the blurred face (a famous local goat rapist who cant be shown for practical reasons) threaten him with this video

he agreed to go to the studio and paint some screenprints

what to say, the guy is a guarantee of positivity, fun and wonder. that’s why this post is so long and the website almost looks like his blog now. big up for momo!

the brazilian artist Nunca was painting this big dude on a facade downtown,

it was really hot, with peaks of 35° (celsius) and the wall had this nice touch of burning sun on it for the whole day (the whole week actually). Every now and then, this other dude in flesh and blood, was coming to visit us and chat a bit about the drawing and the content of it. He lives on the other side of the street and he was coming down to throw away some soil while gardening on his balcony. he was really nice and had a very kind attitude, wich is pretty rare these days, especially if you’re painting a huge wall in a place where people are scared of changes and any sort of non-ignorable news.

when the painting was finished, this charming man showed up again and told us that he would miss us, and that it had been a pleasure for him to see us painting on the other side of the street. He also finally gave us his interpretation of the piece saying that, working on the land, you can finally find resources and opportunities.

well, this guy, is the ex-mayor of Grottaglie, the one that togheter with the council made agreements with the trash company that built the very famous dump right outside town. hiding all these decisions from the people.

now, dear mayor, thanks for the kind words, i hope you’ll find some time to consider my own interpretation of the piece too:

you can make big big money from our land

you just have to fuck with it first

you surely know it better then me though, you guys have fucked it really, really, hard

one of the main shapes of our ceramic tradition is the ivory dish, the artisans of the ceramic district handcut little sponges to sop em up in ceramic ink and paint the blu stars along the borders while the ivory glace is still fresh on the terracotta

another thing that made our little town famous in these last years is our special wastes dump.

southern italy is in real deep shit with the trash business (seen this movie ?). Grottaglie did not need the dump at all and people in town were not given any warn before it was already being built. guess how come?!? now we have trash coming from very far away and the dump seems to get bigger and bigger, there already are three huge lots full of trash and trucks get here daily from northern europe to deliver more shit.

this piece comes in the very right moment, considering that there are workers diggind another huge hole in the ground near the dump. there are reasons to believe that they are going to create a fourth lot and again, our formidable town concillors are not telling anything to their own people. how morbid is this?

italian readers can find a lot more infos here

now, being this is a very personal interpretation, i’ll leave you to the full picture, so you can get your own idea about it.

something is telling me that the local press, who is now getting interested in the festival, wont be talking much about this one, just another little alarm bell ringing…

grazie blu!