Melbourne Street Art Blogs

Melbourne’s street art is a great subject for blogging so allow me to introduce the magnificent seven, seven of the best blogs specializing in Melbourne’s street art.

Melbourne Street Art 86 is a great example of a blog on street art. It declares that “Melbourne’s 86 tram route as a giant open air gallery of street art.” And it documents the street art along the number 86 tramline that runs from Bourke Street in the city through Fitzroy, Collingwood, Clifton Hill, Northcote and Thornbury. The entries are ordered by tram stop location and there are PDF maps to download of the areas. The structure and focus of this blog is great as the liner tram route that the blog follows matches the liner nature of street art bombing/tagging missions. Kevin Anslow spent about 200 hours exploring, photographing, and cataloguing geographical details about street art on the route and building the site. “The project kind of evolved spontaneously, but certainly a central motivation is that it was fun and seemed worth doing as a community resource, and one that celebrates public transport and art.” Kevin explained.

Arty Graffarty started in 2010 and has multiple posts, almost everyday for two years. Subscribe to Arty Graffarty if you want to have your email box full. How he is able to identify all these artists and how he has the energy to do this is beyond me. Mostly the blog is photos but he also promotes and reviews many of the street art exhibitions (and it is great to see his reviews getting longer). He knows his traditional graffiti but doesn’t stick solely to looking at that one style.

Invurt by Factor is like a magazine of news, photos and interviews about the Australian street art scene. Factor is an old hand at graffiti in Perth and Melbourne and is still regularly painting on the streets but not as regularly as he is posting on Invurt. Factor says that he aims to keep Invurt positive but recently he has been posting the occasional editorial with a serious tone.

Images to Live By is written by Alison Young with irregular posts to fit in with her busy life but always worth reading. Alison Young is an academic at Melbourne University who studies graffiti and has co-authored the book, From Street to Studio (Thames & Hudson, 2010) with Ghostpatrol and Miso.

Land of Sunshine by Dean Sunshine features photographs and lots of them grouped by subject or artist. Dean is a dedicated photographer of Melbourne’s street art. Last year Dean brought out a book of photographs from his blog –also known as Land of Sunshine (see my review) Another credit for Dean is the actual Land of Sunshine, the painted laneways around the warehouses of his family business in Brunswick.

Fitzroy Flasher started in 2010. It has lots of photographs of street art, mostly in Fitzroy as the name indicates but not exclusively. Although the focus of the blog is on photographs of street art the text is worth a read.

Flinders Street with painted train

Many of these blogs are on my blogroll but I thought that I’d introduce them to you and give you a bit of background. I have to declare that I know many of these people socially – hi Alison, Factor and Dean. (Arty Graffarty and Fitzroy Flasher remain a mystery to me).

Wait a moment that’s only six blogs. Where’s the seventh?

Land of Sunshine – book review

Dean Sunshine’s Land of Sunshine – A Snapshot of Melbourne Street Art 2010 – 2012, (Brunswick, 2012) soft-back, 300 pages.

Street art does not last forever, it can’t be preserved on the street, only in endless photos and it takes someone with passion to document this huge explosion in art. And Dean Sunshine’s Land of Sunshine is a snapshot, unashamedly a coffee table photography book. It is mostly photographs and lots of them.

It is not that Dean is a photographer – he photographed it all on his “crappy little digital camera.” (Not that you can tell the price of the camera from the photographs in the book.) Dean Sunshine is Melbourne’s equivalent to New York’s Jack Stewart or John Naar. Dean loves Melbourne’s street art and it was this passion that drove him to document it.

The artists selected in the book haven’t been featured in any of the previous books on Melbourne street art: Adnate, Be Free, CDH, Deb, Drab, Heesco, Kaff-eine, Makatron, Phoenix, Slicer, Suki and Urban Cake Lady. There are plenty of great Melbourne street artists to fill a book but this is a good representative selection of the variety.

The individual artists fill half the book – the other half is full of Melbourne walls, paste-ups, exhibitions, international artists visiting Melbourne and installations. It is great to see that street art exhibitions that have featured notably in the scene in recent years. As I wrote, it is mostly photographs but there is an introduction by Fletch of Invurt and the last word goes to Dean.

First there was Dean Sunshine’s photo collection, then the blog Land of Sunshine and now the book – I am green with envy.  Street art has been a boon to publishers filling many a book. Dean’s passion is the difference with this book; he knows Melbourne’s street art and has diligently ensured that most of the images are correctly attributed in the index.

Two curly haired aficionados of Melbourne street art – Andrew King and Dean Sunshine.

Next came to the book launch a major event in Melbourne’s street art scene. The book was launched in a laneway and studio space in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. The space was decorated with a massive day of painting on the weekend before by Kaff-eine, Lucy Lucy, Adnate, Conrad, Fletch, Shida, Choq Mcp, Junky Projects and other artists. Food and drink for the opening was provided by a plethora of sponsors, DJ Jason Digby was laying down the beats for the evening and the guest list was limited to a couple hundred people. An occasion to meet those unfamiliar faces that you know by name from their art on the street and to catch up with other people who document Melbourne’s street art scene like Vetti, Alison, Lorraine, Fletch and Dean.

Heesco’s Shaman @ the Land of Sunshine book launch