#mural

These seven panels are said to be for each of the seven towns this one is twinned with — a crest and a scrap of scenery for each. According to Wikipedia it's one of half a dozen bits of public art round the same town centre, so somebody there was on a mission at some point. I couldn't find out whose idea it was.

They say this was one of a set of three — a mural for people arriving by air, a pavement mosaic in the middle of town for those on foot, and a poster — all meant to welcome you to Barcelona. Apparently a ceramicist friend did the actual tilework.

It's glazed tile set into the brickwork rather than paint, which is presumably how it's held up outdoors this long. I couldn't find much beyond that — not even why it's on this wall and not another. If anyone knows, I'd like the story.

This isn't painted at all — it's ceramic tile, fired in pieces and fixed to the front, which is how it's survived decades outdoors. I couldn't find out who decided the building needed one.

They say he painted a lot of these big public murals around Brazil — I couldn't track down the specific story behind this one, but it hangs in a government building in Minas Gerais.

The words are a poem by a Catalan writer who died at thirty back in the 1920s — according to Wikipedia he ran a bookshop, wrote for anarchist papers, and made poems laid out as pictures rather than lines, which is what somebody put up on the side of a building decades later.

The outfit behind this has apparently done hundreds of painted walls, mostly around France, and the trick is always the same: a blank gable end dressed up as a building that isn't there, with people leaning out of it. They say the figures are usually locals, or names the area is known for.

According to Wikipedia, the man who made it ended up in London after surviving a Soviet labour camp, and spent the rest of his life doing huge ceramic walls like this one. This is just one panel — the whole thing runs along what used to be the civic centre in Peckham, telling the story of one road. They say it's protected now, so it stays even though the building's changed hands.

From what I can find this went up around his hundredth birthday, which is some age to be handed a wall that long. It's outside on the Place des Nations rather than in, so you don't need a pass to get a look at it.

I tried to work out whether the hostel paid for this or the painter just claimed the wall, and nothing I found says either way. Walls like this mostly don't come with paperwork, it seems.

The whole wall tells an old Irish epic — a war fought over a stolen bull, from what I've read, with a queen on one side and a teenage hero on the other.

Whatever this looked like when it went up, decades of weather have worn it down to a faint charcoal sketch of itself.

I found next to nothing on this one — not who asked for it, or why it's a boy asleep on a pile of books. If anyone knows the story, I'd love to hear it.

I couldn't turn up much about why this particular one exists, just that it's enormous.

This wasn't made for anyone to see — he painted it straight onto a wall of his own house, in his seventies, deaf and unwell, and it only got peeled off and moved to canvas after he was gone. Nobody seems to agree on what he meant by it, or whether he meant anything at all.

You'll come across this one in the Vale do Anhangabaú in São Paulo. The signature credits two street artists, and it shows - the delicate mechanical hand doesn't feel like the same one that painted the flowers.

He is a Spanish painter who does these rainbow-geometry giants on buildings all over the world — Marzahn got one across a whole gable end.

They say she was among the people who brought tile panels like this into Lisbon's modern public spaces, including designs for metro stations — this one apparently keeps to that same idea of turning a plain wall into something worth a second look.

Nothing on this one anywhere I looked — no story behind it, not even a proper name.