A splash of colour is being added to London's streets as the UK's capital seeks to bounce back from the COVID-19 lockdown, with more than 150 artists from around the world painting murals across the city.
Organisers decided to go ahead with the festival, which will take place throughout September, in part as they believed it important to brighten up London, which was the epicentre of Britain's COVID-19 outbreak.
Co-founder and CEO of Global Street Art and London Mural Festival, Lee Bofkin, said murals "encourage people to slow down, to have new conversations, to appreciate their environment a bit more, to get off their phone a little bit, or to share it on their phone but encourage other people to leave the house a bit.
The murals are to be painted on private, public and residential property - with permission from homeowners - and organisers hope they will add to the city's rich history of street art, exemplified by London's numerous political murals by Banksy.
London-native, Dean Stockton, better known by his street artist alias D*Face wants the art to remain in the capital for as long as possible. "It's public art, nothing's forever… Obviously when you paint in public you're exposed to the general public and whatever they choose to do with it, and also nature, so you've got the sun, the rain. And that brings about a certain beauty, which is like the natural weathering and aging, which I personally love."
WHAT IS A FRESCO? A fresco (from Italian al fresco, on fresh) is a form of painting in which paints are applied to fresh plaster (rarely on dry plaster - not so durable), with which they are indelibly merged and the painting remains on the wall. First, a rough plaster of sand and lime is applied to the wall, followed by a fine plaster consisting of quartz sand and lime. Fresh plaster is painted with pigments and lime water (you can buy pigments at Samson, Kamnik). Another obstacle is painting on dry plaster, which is coated with slaked lime before painting, but the frescoes are not as durable as painting on fresh plaster. Our most famous fresco is the Dance of the Dead in Hrastovlje in the Primorska region, which depicts the idea that people, regardless of status and profession, are all equal before death. Otherwise, the technique of painting was very popular in ancient times and even earlier in ancient Egypt and in the civilization of Crete. In the Middle Ages, the most famous are the works of Giotto, and in the Renaissance, Michelange's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and the works of Ghirlandai and Raffaello in the Vatican. Very interesting article.I like reading it.