Adding a bit of colour to the streets

outing myself to the Canberra community, originally uploaded by Ampersand Duck.

Did I ever mention that I have a painted car? I think I mentioned it a few months ago. It's not just a painted car, no no no! It's a moving part of the ACT graffiti scene. It's a travelling wall, with no chance of being scrubbed clean or repainted...



We asked a friend of ours to paint it; I painted my last-car-but-one, and found it a fun but gruelling experience. Now this dude (trade-name byrd)does large-scale spraying as a daily practice (well, frequent if not daily), so we bought him some paint from a fun little place in Garema Place called Shifty's and let him go wild.



We chose the colours, and a bit of the text (which is actually Punjabi, as Best Beloved is an Indian language nut). The text is quite hard to read, as it's in brown. One word says 'poem', another says 'prose', and a big line along the side reads something like 'can sleep having read the book'. The rest all belongs to BYRD. I love the green bullbar, and the way the colours move from very light (incorporating the original white) at the front through to heavy, dense and dark at the back.

This car feels different to my last painted car. It was a VW Type 3 stationwagon, painted with metallic purple and red flowers (similar shape to flannel-flowers), and I got a lot of friendly waving and good-humoured responses to it. This car has a slightly edgy response. I'm not sure if it's the colour combination or the use of foreign language on it. Punjabi, to a very untrained eye, can look like a crude form of arabic -- but surely we're not that paranoid a country?

Anyway, we're treating the car like a work in progress, and are getting byrd to add some more to it in the near future; some Aristophanean Frogs, I think.



There's a couple of byrd trademarks on the car -- this one, and



this one. If you see either of these stencilled on a wall next to some shit-hot graffiti, that's byrd. It's a Canberra treasure hunt, worth doing some time when you're driving past an interesting bit of colour.

If you want to see more of his work, or some clues as to where to find some (this is maybe something for The A to Y of Canberra), then check out his own website, fresh in the ether: nibbling at the architecture: byrdsong. I had his URL wrong on my sidebar for the last week, so this whole entry is a bit of compensation.

So if you see any of us driving around, wave. Or just nod your head in a cool sort of way to acknowledge the excellent work of byrd.