When we created The Street Art Directory website we set out to produce the sort of site we’d love to have stumbled across when we began taking a more detailed look at the cities’ walls. The site has continued to evolve and grow through 2022 and now features over 1,500 artists from around the world.
As in previous years we have checked which have been the 10 most-visited artist gallery pages on the site during the last year. We are again surprised (and encouraged) that the top 10 is not dominated by what may be considered the household names of the art world.
We are already working on further improvements for The Street Art Directory in ’23. We have acquired more capacity so will be able to share more photos of street art without fear of running out of space and have almost 6,000 photos and many artists waiting in the wings to be added as well as updating existing galleries.
Anyway, back to the most popular artist galleries on the site in 2022…
NUMBER 1 – Nicky Nailed It
The most visited gallery this year is that of Nicky Nailed It. We have found several of this artist’s child face pasteups around London’s Shoreditch. According to the artist’s website, “Nicky Nailed It™ has been created to encourage the spirit of childhood in the sense of curiosity, freedom and the innocence that drives us to do what makes us happy regardless of outside influence.” Nicky Nailed It can be found on Instagram at @nickynailedit.
NUMBER 2 – LT66
East London’s LT66 has been active as a street artist since 2019 and we found the first of his works in the following year. He has been prolific with his pasteups around East London in 2022. LT66 is a self taught artist working with spray paint applied by brush to vintage newspaper. He shares very well observed and executed paintings of his female muses. Original artwork can be purchased from his website and he can be found on Instagram at @lt66art.
NUMBER 3 – Jake Ghost
The third most visited artist gallery in 2022 was Jake Ghost. This is another artist whose work we have found around East London. His pasteup works featuring celebrities including Amy Winehouse, Boris Johnson, Kate Moss and Pete Docherty have been a fixture since 2019. Jake Ghost is on Instagram at @_ghostgallery.
NUMBER 4 – Mantra Rea
French artist Mantra Rea is well known for his ultra-realistic large scale pinned butterfly murals which incorporate excellent use of shade to convince you that you are actually looking at a massive entomological cabinet rather than the side of a building. On our site we feature two of Mantra’s works, both from Jaco in Costa Rica. Check out Mantra Rea’s Instagram account @mantrarea.
NUMBER 5 – Cliff Phillips
Cliff Phillips has featured regularly in The Street art Directory’s ‘Top 10s’. A very talented artist, his pasteups have been encountered mainly in Manchester’s Northern Quarter but also in London. We interviewed Cliff a couple of years back and you can read this here. Cliff remains popular despite the lack of a social media presence.
NUMBER 6 – Bluntroller
Bluntroller is a talented stencillist who has a running (bouncing?) space hopper theme. The first works we found of his were of a policeman on a space hopper. In 2022 Bluntroller’s gleeful Queen Elizabeth on a space hopper took on an added an added poignancy with her passing. He doesn’t have an online shop or website that we could find but Bluntroller can be contacted via his Instagram: @bluntroller87.
NUMBER 7 – Helch
The artist known as Helch is perhaps the only truly ‘famous’ graffiti artist in this year’s Top 10. Helch’s fame (infamy?) stems from a 20m ‘HELCH’ tag on a railway viaduct in Windsor back in 2019 which left the late Queen Elizabeth “extremely upset”. Helch has since adorned a number of motorway bridges around London including amending the popular ‘Give peas a chance’ over the M25 to ‘Give Helch a chance’. Helch has since widely decorated east London with his undoubted roller talents. He has recently launched his first (and very quickly sold out) print and retains a low profile on social media.
NUMBER 8 – Thierry Jaspart
We don’t know a lot about Thierry Jaspart. We know he is a bilingual visual artist who lists his skills as including ”illustration, photography, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, video shooting and editing”. His pasteups have been prominent around East London for some time now. Thierry is on Instagram as @thierryjaspart and he has a website.
NUMBER 9 – Jean Peut-être
Jean Peut-être, produces modern screen prints on old paper – blueprints, accountancy papers, maps and more. His highly detailed single colour works of fish, lobsters, unbrellas, etc. are very distinctive and the bold designs stand out on any city wall. We have a large collection of Jean Peut-être’s work on The Street Art Directory. Find Jean Peut-être on Instagram at @jeanpeutetre and via his website.
NUMBER 10 – Marco Polo
Marco Polo is a talented Essex/London-based urban artist and painter who has worked on walls on the streets of London, New York, Los Angeles and Barcelona. He works in acrylic, oil paint, spray paint and stencil. It is perhaps a surprise to see Marco Polo in The Street Art Directory‘s Top 10 as we have not found any works of his on walls since 2015, after which time he put his efforts into gallery works. In fact he seems to have vanished without trace. Hopefully Marco Polo will resurface with a new body of work, either on walls or canvases, in due course.
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