Look Again

I don't know what's happening to me lately - whether my mind is playing tricks on me, but I keep walking past walls I know so well and seeing something new. Or maybe old. Or maybe I am just not sure - how have I missed that before? Whether it's a grand paste up, or a tiny tag, everything seems to be alive and changing faster than my visual memory can keep up. That's the energy of street art, one piece goes up, there is a response, another follows, the shape and mood changes, the wall evolves. I've said before, blink and you miss it, you snooze you lose. Like many places in Melbourne and indeed the great CBD itself, Fitzroy has some ancient walls, and each layer ads depth but doesn't erase the previous (unless some twat cleans the wall). You look past the more recent art and you see Ha Ha, or a few lines of a face that could be Ghost Patrol. The remnants of Phoenix I see everywhere. Then there are all these stencils that I can't quite place, so many of them, tiny stencils, and I think about the time that they were new, and eagerly anticipated. Lately I have spent more time close to old paths so I have really stopped to look into the eyes of these walls and ask them to speak to me of their history. It feels like I am staring at one of those 3D pictures that when you slacken your focus reveals a new image. So this blog is a hats off to the old, a welcome to the new, and a celebration of the little things...