Just started reading another book I was given for my birthday this year, The Street Art Stencil Book by art direction agency ON.Studio.

I have it on authority from my Norwegian gift-giving friend that street art is big news in Stavanger just now. Have you ever been to Stavanger? It’s no Hoxton, so the street art thing is a tiny bit surprising. Being Scandinavia though, it is style savvy.

Anyway, about the book. I knew nothing about this medium before (except for Banksy), but can now confidently share with you that French artist Blek Le Rat is broadly considered to be the ‘father of stencil street art’. He was one of the names who pioneered the move towards using stencils in the 80’s, although it actually goes back to the 60’s (and a guy called Ernest Pignon among others). The focus of the book is actually contemporary artists and – how cool – it even includes stencils so you can recreate some of their work.

*

*

I’m already mentally assembling my twilight grafittier’s outfit…

Most thrilling of all is the discovery of London artist Eine (Ben Flynn) because would you believe it, I’d snapped some of his work around East London before.

*My finger, by the way, is pretty excited by its first on-blog appearance.