Spain For Pleasure

Last year I posted about Granadino graffiti artist El Niño de las Pinturas. He’s something of a local hero round here, owing to his trademark and instantly recognisable style that adorns the city’s walls, particularly in my bario, El Realejo.

Each piece I have seen is extraordinarily well done, and I insist on taking any friends on a tour of his works each time I am visited. Neither they nor anybody I’ve met here in Granada has ever had a bad word to say about the mystery man’s cultured contributions. Often he is invited by local businesses to come and jazz up their dull and colourless walls, and a couple of the local museums in town even feature him in their brochures. It gives Granada an urban edge that it would otherwise lack.

So it came as a shock when I happened to walk by one of my favourite pieces near the infamous, el niño-fied house, to find that it had  been scrubbed away. Well, nearly anyway. Whoever had been assigned the task hadn’t done a very good job of it; there was still half of it left, as if to suggest that the design had been defiled out of pure spite.

Las Caras, back in October

…and now

What is the point?

Fair enough, at the end of the day these walls are somebody else’s property, and el niño, among other urban artists (some of whose works are admittedly a lot uglier in comparison) probably don’t have permission to use them. But what’s done is done, and as a matter of fact they (el niño’s contributions at least) actually brighten the place up, and bring an extra element to Granada’s cultural side.

I desperately hope that this isn’t the start of a mass graffiti-ridding project. There’s good graffiti and there’s bad graffiti, and el niño de las pinturas is unquestionably of the former sort.

Tags: art, el niño, graffiti, Granada

Throughout the 10 months or so that I have been lucky enough to call myself a resident of Granada, I have always been fascinated with the plethora of unrivalled Graffiti that adorns the historical city’s walls. Some of it, admittedly, is either of a shoddy or unremarkable standard, but a handsome percentage of this urban art is nothing short of awe-inspiring. There are, I’m sure, hundreds of would-be-artists claiming recognition for some of the city’s most famed pieces, but if you were to stop beside one and ask a number of passing locals if they knew the name of the artisan behind it, you would most likely hear just one answer: El Niño de las Pinturas (The Child of The Paintings). This guy is a proper legend. And I mean PROPER. For years he has been smearing previously dull-white walls with his unmistakable signature across the whole of Granada. Some of his pieces have featured in art magazines, documentaries and are now even considered a tourist attraction by the Granada Tourism Board, who will only be too happy to point art-ardent tourists in the right direction.

“Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.” 

― Banksy, Wall and Piece

The best part is, he remains a mystery. Well, perhaps not entirely, as I’m sure there are plenty of locals who would instantly recognise him in the street, but  amongst us ‘giris’, the man’s face is as recognisable as a long lost aunt’s after two car crashes and several facelifts. A friend of mine was adamant that she knew the luminary’s identity, but after a terribly awkward yet hilarious (for me) conversation in a pub, the alleged master-painter (no, ‘painter’, not ‘bater’) turned out to be a full-time ice-cream vendor. Whoever he is, he’s supposed to be really nice anyway; another friend was lucky enough to have part of her garden wall painted by him, though the piece, sadly, has remained unfinished for years. Anyhow, I considered it not only a resident’s unmitigated duty, but a wholly gratifying experience to wander Granada’s streets and capture a selection of the legendary artist’s most stunning efforts. Scroll away…

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Tags: art, el niño, graffiti, Granada