One street artist that keeps busy painting the walls of Shoreditch in London is RUN. RUN is an Italian street artist living in London, and he recently painted the large Village Underground wall off Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch. RUN's subjects involve large side-profile heads and hands. He's also been painting telephones around walls in Shoreditch.
I photographed more of RUN's artwork at the Dulwich art house: Open Day at the Street Art House, Dulwich Arts Festival: Part 2 and Open Day at the Street Art House, Dulwich Arts Festival: Part 1. At this Dulwich art house, RUN painted telephones on the walls inside the house and a large mural of a head and figures on the largest exterior wall.
For the Village Underground wall, which is repainted every couple of months, RUN created a swan-like figure using hands and a side-profile head. These are both common trade-marked subjects for the artist, as I have mentioned. This mural has been up for about three weeks now.
The Village Underground wall
This spring, I started noticing painted telephones appearing on some of the walls just off of Brick Lane. All of these old-style dial telephones look different; some are them have the receiver on the side while others are 'hung up' on top. Others have a cord running to the ground, while some do not. Another group of telephones forms a running man. The telephones are painted with a thin outline and light and shadows, characteristic of RUN's other artwork. (More of these can be seen in the Dulwich art house galleries.)
A selection of RUN's telephones photographed around Brick Lane.
A telephone hidden away...
Phone on a door with many tags over it
The most common trademark for this artist are the side-profile and normally large-scale heads. I have photographed a selection of these. Most of the time, the artist likes to put the heads at an odd angle, or upside-down. This really makes the work stand out on the streets.
A selection of RUN's figures in various locations around Shoreditch.
I discovered this bird skeleton crossed with a human hand in a car park around the same time that RUN painted the large mural on the Village Underground. It was difficult to take a photograph because there's a lot of street art on the walls here, but you're not allowed to take photographs from inside the car park.
RUN
For more examples of RUN's work, visit the official website: http://www.runabc.org/
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