“I prefer to work in my studio, create a stencil, then go in the street and paint with something already prepared.” He worked with stencils because he is not very good at freehand work, he says. “Actually, I wanted to be famous,” he says, chuckling, “and it was a good way to get famous very easily.”
But Europe had no graffiti artists, and Blek liked the idea of having his work seen by thousands of people. When Blek graduated in the early 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring had hit the big time in America. “It took me 10 years to digest all the things I saw in New York,” he says. He switched to architecture and began to think about how people in cities interact with buildings that are often plastered with advertisements. He studied engraving and painting at the School of Beaux Arts in Paris, but didn’t much like it. Well before he knew he would become a street artist, during a trip to New York as an adolescent, Blek was taken by early graffiti on subway walls and buildings. A pair of doves with golden wings flies over the dancing couple, a reference to the name of the property, which translates to “golden dove.” “It was good that someone who knows how to work at that scale could help.” A team of street artists from Nashville applied the paint, piecing together the monumental image from about 140 stencils, laying down the black first, then an overlay of white. It’s killing him that he has not been able to see the huge mural in person, although he hopes to revisit Houston one day soon to add his famous signature.Įven if he could have traveled, Blek says, the size was daunting. So he did not actually paint the wall himself. The big Houston wall was commissioned by Hines, the Zimmerman family and TIAA Global Asset Management and managed by Weingarten Art Group and it involved an international collaboration between the artist, a stencil maker in Los Angeles and a team of assistants.īlek, a gentle-looking family man whose real name is Xavier Prou, has been stuck at home about 50 miles from Paris since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Probably needless to say, this is a far cry from Blek’s youthful work on the streets of Paris, when his signature - a leaping rat - aptly illustrated his initial mode of working illegally. Photo: Mark Mulligan, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Assistants of Blek Le Rat, an internationally renowned French artist known as the father of stencil graffiti, painted the 46-foot tall mural in a week, using about 140 stencils.
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