Apish Angel lands in the City of Angels

Tonight is Nick's, aka Apish Angel, solo show opening party live in Los Angeles' Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art in Hollywood.

It was a bit of a roadblock, with a buying frenzy over his (signed) posters and tongue-in-cheek stenciled canvases. I loved the take on the four US Presidents' heads (Mount Rushmore National Memorial, South Dakota)...replacing George Washington (1732-1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) were Lindsay Lohan, Brittany Spears, and Paris Hilton.

I wondered how the prices would translate from GBP to US$...very favorably (for Nick and Carmichael) with pieces fetching up to US$35,000 price tags :). I met some Israeli collectors who came out to support and pick up some unique pieces from the show.





News fresh off the press Nick is featured on the cover of the UK's Independent on Sunday newspaper 'Art and Culture' section. Nice one, Nick! Brisssstol!

Nick Walker: The existentialist "The late, great director Stanley Kubrick employed Walker for his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, to recreate graffiti along the streets of New York. "It was the worst style of graffiti; it had to look as if it had been done by crack-heads," says the 39-year-old.

Walker never trained at art college. He started his career as a graffiti painter, writing on the streets of Bristol. It was when he moved to London that he started to work on feature films.

For Judge Dredd, the Sylvester Stallone vehicle, he studied Hebrew and Japanese letters to come up with a futuristic style.

He still works on the street but does not consider himself a graffiti artist. "I'm just an artist," he says. "That's how I make my living."

There is an existential flavour to his art. "The whole thing with graffiti is that it's about making your mark, leaving something behind," he says. "We are here to create."

He uses images of butterflies, because they live for only a week, to depict the fragility of life. "These butterflies shed their colour before they die," he says, mournfully.

Not that his work is always so serious. His Moona Lisa, for example, is an image of the Mona Lisa showing her bare behind to the viewer."