The (UK) Conservative Party has proposed a series of cuts, including a freeze of child benefit, income support, tax credits, dole, and housing benefit. These are opposed by various parties and advocacy groups in both Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The mural above is on the Divis Street international wall, while Black Mountain/Slıabh Dubh currently carries the same message: #stoptorycuts. Protest rallies were held today (2014-10-11) in both Belfast and Dublin.
UVF mural showing the flags and insignia of the UVF and YCV (Young Citizen Volunteers), Ballyduff/Glengormley 1st East Antrim Battalion, alongside the flags of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Great Britain.
Surf- and skate-boarder Tony Alva (web) is the subject of this Psychonautes (web | Fb) stencil in Garfield Street. In addition to another Tony Alva, Psychonautes has also done portraits of two other skateboarding legends – Steve Caballero and Rodney Mullen – in the Frenchman’s adopted hometown of Cork. Some idea of the method used can be gathered from this video of the production of a piece for a tapas restaurant in Dublin.
Roles are reversed, compared to the first book of Samuel: the Israeli ‘David’ has become a ‘Goliath’ tank, while the role of underdog is filled by Palestinian teenager Faris Odeh who was shot and killed a few days after standing up to this tank (WP). The AP photograph on which the mural is based can be seen in this May 2012 edition of (the Pakistani) The Nation.
The stained-glass style of ‘Wolf’ by James Earley of Dublin, for Culture Night Belfast 2014, is perhaps due to the influence of the family business in ecclesiastical art (inputout.com). Wide shot of the whole below.
MTO (Fb) was in Belfast for Culture Night and painted a large piece entitled “Son of Protagoras”. The ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius reports that Protagoras was driven from Athens and his books burned because he wrote that it was impossible to know whether or not the gods existed. On Fb, MTO adds a description of the Northern Irish “peace” lines, perhaps suggesting that religious adherence continues to be an enemy of peace: in his painting, a dove has been pierced by arrows bearing the cross of the Knights of Malta and the Latin cross; or, as the wide shot below illustrates, the fences get in the way.
KVLR’s massive (four storey high) work for this past weekend’s Red Bull Music Academy live music festival, painted just prior to Culture Night Belfast 2014, shows a boy sitting serenely on a speaker listening with headphones to a single-reel tape player plugged into a flue on the side of the building. On his knitted hat is the logo of the British Phonograph Industry’s 1980’s campaign against cassette taping.
A. E. Housman’s 1919 short poem “Here dead we lie” is featured, together with the poppies that grew on the Western Front in WWI, in this UVF commemorative mural. The 36th (Ulster) Division is not mentioned specifically; the plaque on the right-hand side (which pre-dates the mural) lists the names of five UVF members killed in the 70s who are depicted in the mural just out of picture but seen below in a wide shot of both murals (and by itself in C Coy Street). For a similar connecting of the two Ulster Volunteer Forces, see 100 Years Apart, Armed & Ready, Years Of Sacrifice, and others. Another wide shot is given in C Coy Street, taken from the main road and shows that the fish-and-chip shop on the Shankill is called “A Salt And Battered”.
“Here dead we lie, because we did not choose, to live and shame the land, from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, but young men think it is, and we were young.”
Here is Inkie’s new piece on the side wall of the butcher’s in Gresham Street, done for Culture Night Belfast, 2014. It includes a shout-out to the Loko skate-shop, just across the street. There’s a close-up of the work below.
Here is the first of a number of panels from new work by Ciaran Gallagher (web) for CNB14 – Belfast Stripped Bare – in the courtyard of the Dark Horse/Duke of York. The piece humorously depicts a row of houses. In this pair, a woman smokes a cigarette on the front step of a house with portraits of Kennedy and the pope above the mantle, next door to a pregnant lesbian couple with a pride poster and a cat. The brick-work is real.
Extramural Activity 