Clever Street Art Plays With Its Environment by Alex Face

One of my all-time favorite pieces of street art is this giant mural by Poland-based artist Natalia Rak. In it, a young girl is holding a painted watering can above a real life tree. To me, this is the creme of the crop when it comes to street art. While many street artists paint murals on walls with no particular meaning, there are a select few who really study the urban environment and create works that cleverly interact with the real life objects around them. (Ernest Zacharevic is a genius at this.)

Today, I was pleased to to come across the works of Alex Face, a well-known graffiti artist in Thailand. Face wanders the streets and alleys of Bangkok looking for the perfect building he can use as his canvas. In many of his pieces, you can’t quite tell where his works begin. Are you looking at real life props like wires, branches and leaves or did Face draw them in?

One of my favorite pieces is the one he created with first graders at a local elementary school. The messy, spray-painted scribbles are the perfect backdrop for Face’s funny baby. Speaking of baby, what led him to center all of his work around an adorable toddler? According to Widewalls, the baby idea was inspired by the birth of his own daughter. He draws the baby with a third eye because, “I believe in the spirit, that is how I grew up, I feel the spirit” he says. The third eye in his drawings represents another dimension “it’s something that we can feel but can’t see with two eyes so I add the third eye which can see what we can’t”.