Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 23)

 STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 23)

You find them in almost any tourist/arty souvenir shop: bits of wood, roughed up to make them look like bits of driftwood picked up from the beach, usually painted blue with a stencil slogan on them saying things like 'This way to the beach'. They're ten a penny and probably made in Hong Kong. There's one that caught my eye though simply because it's open to interpretation. It says 'Exmouth is not a destination it's a way of life.' 

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 22)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 22)

A regional variation in graffiti in Exmouth is in the combination of spray paint and marker pen, sometimes creating a weird and interesting hybrid. This, for example, which looks almost like an Aztec fractal...

Street Art Exmouth Style

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 21)

Looks like I'll be dining out tonight then...

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 20)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 20)

Another typical night of depravity down at The Exmouth Arms...

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 19)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 19)

Not so much street art Exmouth style but art all the same and in Exmouth. There's a fellow who goes down the beach and he spends ages building towers of pebbles and rocks. Slowly and very carefully balancing the pebbles on top of one and other in full knowledge that come the end of the day when the tide comes in his sculptures will be washed away.

I was watching him doing this and I was thinking: 'This is art and this man is an artist.' And I thought: 'That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to build my own pebble sculptures. Physically and metaphorically.' And I thought: 'That's what I'm going to be when I grow up. I'm going to be an artist.'

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 18)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 18)

With the intention of promoting Exmouth as a gateway to the Jurassic Coast World Heritage site, a trail of life-size model dinosaurs is being set up throughout the town. The initial plan is for the dinosaurs to be in place for a year but at a recent town council meeting, Councillor Brian Bailey gushed: "I'd like to propose we keep the trail as a permanent fixture. It would be totally worthwhile for a year but it would be better for 10 or 15 years! To be known as the 'dinosaur town' would be a good attraction for Exmouth."

All well and good but it would appear Councillor Bailey doesn't get out a lot or else he'd know Exmouth ain't no dinosaur town - this is psilocybin country. Magic mushrooms, man. They're everywhere. The fields, the parks, the verges are coated with them. Exmouth is awash with natural, free, hallucinogenic drugs. They're so abundant it's almost rude not to eat them. In fact, it's nigh on impossible not to have them as part of a mainstay diet.

So, in regard to these life-size model dinosaurs popping up everywhere - perhaps now it might be understood why they're really starting to freak everyone out...

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 17)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 17)

With the intention of promoting Exmouth as a gateway to the Jurassic Coast World Heritage site, a trail of life-size model dinosaurs is being set up throughout the town.

All very good and educational you might think but when you're walking home at night drugged-up to your eyeballs and you come face-to-face with one of the mothers, it can be a little freaky...

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 16)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 16)

Life is a beach (and other cliches) ...

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 15)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 15)

His name is Mr Trotter and for six days a week, year in year out, come rain or shine he stands there like a Colossus of Rhodes in miniature, surveying the surging masses as they sweep through the town in their shopping frenzy. There he stands outside of Porky Down in the Magnolia Centre, smiling his smile, as proud as Punch to be Exmouth's most famous resident.

I sometimes, however, get to wonder and I sometimes get to suspect that not everything is how it at first seems and not everyone is how they at first appear. Take for example Mr Trotter and others much like him. Those who would appear to be always merry and bright, always happy and smiling, always with a song in their heart and a skip in their step. Never down in the dumps, never depressed, never red of eye having spent all night crying into their pillow. How can this be so, I ask? In this town? In this country? In this world? What's their secret? What do they know that others don't? Or what don't they know?

Are they not paying attention?

I sometimes get to wonder if Mr Trotter and others like him are for real?

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 14)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 14)

Not that I wish to compare Exmouth to a Nazi death camp but hanging over the road leading into the town is a large banner proclaiming the names of various pop bands and pop stars from the 1980s: Thompson Twins, Bananarama, Howard Jones, ABC, Go West, Nik Kershaw, Five Star, Nick Heyward, Midge Ure, Brother Beyond, etc, etc.

One man's pleasure is another man's pain. One man's pop heaven is another man's pop hell.

Over the gate to the entrance of Auschwitz was the proclamation 'Arbeit Macht Frei', translated as 'Work makes you free'. Over the gate leading to Dante's Inferno was the inscription 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here'.

I'm really not trying to compare and contrast, I'm really not.

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 13)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 13)

I don't know what they put in the cider down here in Exmouth but I can guarantee you can enter any local pub on a Saturday night and be met by some bloke standing on a table with his wife's knickers on his head singing "Zider I up, landlord! Zider I up, landlord! Put more zider in my jug, I just can't get enough! Zider-I-up-landlord!" Over and over again. The more reasonable customers in the meantime are usually sat around urging each other to "Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff up thy snuff"; whilst over pints of Pernod and black (and cider chasers) their lady friends discuss the size of their husband's and boyfriend's nether regions.

Its an emotional experience, I can tell you.

Down at The Grove on the seafront things can sometimes take a turn for the weirder and there's been a few occasions when I've left that particular drinking den soaring ten miles high above the earth as life below turned into a Walt Disney cartoon. I've left there being able to touch sound and hear colours. It's really quite strange.

With this in mind, the pub sign for The Grove is a very apt work of art that serves not only as a warning but as a preview of how the world might look when you leave. I particularly like the little park bench at the centre of the painting, suggesting this is where you're going to end up sleeping that night.

It's probably one of the best pub signs in Exmouth.

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 12)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 12)

I sometimes identify with Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now when he makes his famous 'I love the smell of napalm' speech. There's chaos all around, his helicopters having just laid waste to a Vietnamese village. A bomb explodes behind him but he doesn't flinch. He looks to his men and says: "Some day this war's going to end." And he says it as though it's a prediction, contemplating it as though it will be a sad day when that day comes...

In a backstreet deep down in the depths of Exmouth - down in the belly of the beast - there are what can only be described as slum dwellings. Ruins, basically. They're going to be demolished and new town houses built in their place, and I can't help feeling that it will be a sad day when that day comes. I'm sure most people view these old buildings as eyesores and will be glad to see them knocked down but I see them as pieces of art, really. Representations of beauty ravaged.

The ghost signs and the graffiti that I once photographed and stuck up on this blog have already gone, so I'm glad I at least managed to capture them for posterity before being lost forever. And now these slum dwellings are due to go also. In their place, new, modern-day town houses are to be built and I'm sure they're going to be all very nice even if only Russian oligarchs might be able to afford them. I still can't help feeling it will be a sad day though.

The old order changeth, yielding place to new. We're at the end of an age.

Some day this war's going to end.

And in posting the above photographs, it enables me also to post one of my most favourite quotes. From Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, who fought in the Spanish Civil War:

"We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth, there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute."

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 11)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 11)

Not so much street art Exmouth style but art all the same and in Exmouth. Up on top of Orcombe Point at the western end of the Jurassic Coast you'll find a compass rose near to the cliff edge pointing to Woodbury Common, Sandy Bay, Dawlish Warren and the 250 million years old Triassic rocks out on the sea bed. 
And when standing there taking in the view what song might spring to mind? Why, Jah Jah Call You by World Domination Enterprises, of course.

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 10)

 STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 10)

I've always had a fondness for bees and always pay them much respect. So, much respect to the tea rooms in Manor Gardens, Exmouth, for not only calling themselves Bumble and Bee but for having a very large stencil of a bee on the outside wall of the building. 

As Kate Bush once said in an interview with the NME many years ago: "Fancy being a bee, leading an incredible existence. All these flowers designed just for you. Flying into the runway, incredible colours. Some trip...."

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 9)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 9)

They call them 'ghost signs'. Old, hand-painted murals on gable ends advertising products and businesses from a by-gone age. And it's an apt name to give them as they are indeed like ghosts from the past offering somewhat haunted glimpses into history.

They can be found on buildings in towns throughout Britain, and Exmouth is no exception. In fact, Exmouth can boast one of the most beautiful examples on a derelict, boarded-up building near to the centre of town. Yes, there really are boarded-up, derelict buildings in Exmouth and it's all the better here for them.

The ghost sign in question is a mural advertising a long-gone photo studio by the name of Memory Makers. I know nothing more about it than that. Which is rather fitting and also rather poignant.

Memory Makers: a place where memories were once saved but now itself fading from memory...

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 8)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 8)

Ho, ho, ho....

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 7)

 STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 7)

In a shop doorway on Rolle Street in Exmouth is a beautiful picture of the sun composed of tiles on a wall. And I've seen that as people walk by going about their daily business they pay this picture not a blind bit of notice. Either they're oblivious to it, they're otherwise engaged, or they're simply not interested. Whatever the reason, it seems to go unnoticed. And there's a kind of sadness about this because it begs the question 'what else goes unnoticed?' Do people not see any of the other works of art around them? Do they not see all the other faces around them? Do they not notice the real sun in the sky? Or the clouds, or the moon, or the stars? Do they not notice the world? Do they not love the world? Do they not love the clouds, the moon, or the stars? Do they not love the sun?

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 6)

 STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 6)

Daubed upon the wall of a seemingly derelict building in one of the old back streets in the heart of Exmouth, an incongruous piece of graffiti hangs in view of all who pass by. Its origin, its meaning and to what it refers has long been forgotten over the many years it's been there. It's neither a statement, a slogan or a declaration but a question, and it's precisely this that makes it so beguiling. It may well have originally been put there with but one very simple meaning but to what it alluded has long since gone leaving it now to take on any meaning that anyone cares to bestow upon it. Or even no meaning at all.

If it wasn't before, it has now become a work of art and is as much a part of Exmouth as a freckle might be on the face of a child.

Let it fade in it's own right and let it never be erased because it's street art - Exmouth style.

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 5)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE - THE CLIPPER

More art on display in Exmouth and this time it's the pub sign up on the facade of The Clipper, down at the far end of The Strand.

The building that's now one of Exmouth's better known pubs used to be a tea warehouse during the eighteenth Century owned by the East India Company. In recognition of this, the painting is of a type of sailing ship called a Tea Clipper, used to transport tea from China alongside large amounts of opium from India. The opium would be grown in India then transported to China in exchange for the tea which would then be brought to England. The tea would be unloaded at Exmouth then transported by coach and horses to London where it was much sought after. This was the trade which launched what is known as the Opium Wars between Britain and China.

There's no record of it but surely if you've been ferrying opium across the oceans to trade for some tea from China, wouldn't you be inclined to bring a few sacks of opium back to England with you as well as the tea? It's a given. There wouldn't have been any need to have even smuggled it as opium was perfectly legal then. So what was happening to that opium once it was unloaded at Exmouth dock of old? Where was it going? Who was having it? London would be an obvious destination but wouldn't a quantity also have remained within the local town? Which, of course, presents us with a scenario:

Jethro, the local docker, gets his hands on a sack of pure opium and takes it down to his mates at the local tavern. "Yer!" he says "Put down thy zider and 'ave a blast o' this. S'better than any snuff, I can tell 'ee. Mix it with thy baccy, it's gurt lush." 

It doesn't take very long before they're all regular users. "Prapper job," they all agree "An' no mistake."

So was opium usage rife in Exmouth at one point? And if so, for the years in which the locals were all smoking opium before the East India Company ceased trading in it, did any work get done? Did it add to the general ingrained and natural mellowness of the locals? "Field needs ploughing, cowz need milkin'. Bugger it, do it 'morrow."

What dreams did unfold during that period? What visions were grasped?

So you see, the casual observer might at first glance think the pub sign outside The Clipper is just of some old boat but it is in fact a clue, a nod and a wink to Exmouth's very secret history.

And another thing:

Almost all the bands that play in Exmouth and the surrounding area are what might be called 'pub bands', as in bands that play the local pub circuit covering songs by other more famous bands. It's surprising then, that none have had the idea to call themselves 'The Beer Garden', or simply 'Beer Garden'. The free advertising on offer to a band of that name is staggering. At The Clipper for example, emblazoned on the pub sign: 'Beer Garden At Rear'.

So, is 'Beer Garden' not the perfect name for a pub band? And just to confuse things, might it be an idea if another pub band called themselves simply 'At Rear', and they played joint gigs with Beer Garden?

Prapper job, an' no mistake

John Serpico

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 4)

STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 4)

"Together - we will love the beach, we will learn and teach. Change our pace of life, we will work and strive. 

Go west - sun in wintertime, we will feel just fine. Where the skies are blue - go west - this is what we're gonna do."

Pet Shop Boys - Go West.