Street art can be found any and everywhere. I visited Lisbon around this time in 2018, I was meant to go the previous year, unfortunately I was in a car accident and had to undergo physiotherapy for 2 and a half months, which was the same time I was meant to fly over for a project that explored Lisbon as the creative city.
I was determined to travel to Lisbon, so luckily the following year I did, and from the research that I had done the previous year there was one place that I wanted to go to more than anything else and that was the LX Factory.
Street art is not the only thing that you can expect to find at the LX Factory, it has bars, cafes, restaurants, vintage shops and much more, however I focused on the art and how creative the area is.
Walking through we had shops on both sides of us, hanging above us are these flamingos. I assume they’re meant to be flamingos as they were pink they might have just been normal birds but pink, they were designed to make it appear like they’re flying. It was a great effect because this wasn’t throughout the area so was a surprise when we turned the corner.
Both of these pictures display the birds however I wanted to add a black & white effect that focused solely on the birds and the man made hole in the wall that had a plant in. Having this effect with the birds flying gave the picture a more dramatic feel to it, generating a sense of peacefulness and tranquility to it, when compared to the other picture that had more colour and more things going on. I posted both pictures instead of just the black & white one because I felt that the entire story needed to be told of this street. Its liveliness, colour and creativeness all needed to be shared and then have the birds on their own showing another side to the story.
Almost everywhere I looked I found street art of different sizes and in different positions, some almost going unnoticed because we’d be walking looking at one and not realise that there is another one on the back of a building we had walked past. Even when looking for a place to eat I came across one restaurant that had an outdoor area and on the outdoor wall was a beautiful piece of artwork, with a quote reading “Para todo mal, mezcal, y para todo bien, tambiéne” which loosely translates to “for every evil, there’s mescal, (a drink) and for every good, also”. One thing that I liked in particular about this artwork was how the artist had made the eyes on the skulls reflect, which gave a feeling of emptiness to them, like there’s no afterlife, their souls and personalities just gone, however the fact that no skull was the same meant there was still something there.
It should come as no surprise, that the last picture I took in the LX Factory, would be one of an abstract street art piece, there’s something that draws me to abstract art. It could be the fact that there are no limits, and because of, this in my opinion, allows the artist to express their creativity more.
On the outside wall of a cafe was an amazing piece of creative street art, what I liked about this piece, wasn’t just the range of colour that was involved but the use of colour, how they blended into each other, yellows to oranges to reds. The artist Misterpiro a Spanish painter is known for using water based techniques where the colours in his artwork blend into each other. Amongst the blends of different colours in this particular piece was a face, making an abstract fragment portrait art piece. In the original picture the colours weren’t as strong however to really impose the detail and have the majority of the focus on the face, I decided to make the colours slightly darker, I believe this made for a more striking picture as the emphasis was pinpointed to one element.
Lisbon was such a great place to visit, and the LX Factory was even better then I could have imagined, it was full of creativity and different forms of art. It’s definitely a place that I would go to again because there were some areas of the LX factory that I didn’t get a chanced to go to. I think exploring and finding out the different creative styles that different countries have, is important. I can’t wait to see where my next adventure takes me.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post see you again soon.
ExpressCreativity0121 