Xtra Diary - Stik’s own twist on art of graffiti - Elusive "guerilla artist" talks about his show at the Subway Gallery in Edgware Road

Published: 11 March 2011

Stik’s own twist on art of graffiti

IN the debate about graffiti and other types of illicit underground art, some praise the protagonists as creators of beauty while others dismiss them as talentless vandals. 

But according to Stik – an elusive “guerilla” painter whose work is currently on show in the Subway Gallery in Edgware Road – the guys with the spray cans serve a valuable function as “outreach workers”.

“It’s important that people recognise that street art, although it has an artistic purpose, is also a forum and a really healthy way for people to express themselves,” he says. “It’s an outreach medium that reaches out to really very destitute people.”

Stik is a street artist in every sense of the word. For years he was homeless and lived in squats in Hackney and the West End. He has run workshops for rough sleepers and says he loves using walls and shop shutters as his canvases so that everyone – from the very rich to the very poor – can see and feel inspired by them.

And he takes a dim view of recent media campaigns for a more hardline approach to squatters and Westminster City Council’s plans to ban rough sleeping.

“How can you ban homelessness?” he says. “What people should really be asking is why is it so hard to hold down a home – why is it so hard to keep a home? I have squatted with the Oubliette Collective (who occupied the derelict Limelight building in Shaftesbury Avenue). The Oubliette are very respectful of buildings. They are high-end squatters and they leave the place in a very good state. It’s a way of living in the centre of the city, where space is seen as exclusive, and is a way of recouping disused space. If I wasn’t squatting, I would have been on the street.” 

Stik has daubed his trademark strangely eerie stick figures in Soho and the Phoenix Garden in Covent Garden.

• Single, an exhibition of Stik’s work, is at the Subway Gallery, Kiosk One, Pedestrian Subway under Edgware Rd/Harrow Rd, W2 until March 26.

Pizza spinner almost comes top

FORGET the London Olympics, for fans of the margarita the World Pizza Games in Las Vegas is the premier competitive event. 

West End pizza maestro Marian Lorencik, who works at Pulcinella in Old Compton Street, flew home with a silver medal after coming second in the pizza spinning category.

The chef broke a world record when he twirled flattened dough on his finger for over six minutes. 

Bizarre pizza acrobatics – including back-flipping while lobbing pizza disks into the air and juggling with dough balls – were much in evidence at the annual event. 

Apparently these sorts of stunts are extremely popular in Japan, and Diary hears Marian has been poached by a Japanese Pizza Circus scout. He is due to travel to Tokyo soon to be trained in tightrope walking across stretched dough. 

Marian’s journey has taken him from his birthplace in Slovakia to London and on to America – thus proving that pizza is a truly international dish. Not surprising, perhaps, as Marian’s Italian mentor Tony Micallef, who owns Pulcinella, told Diary: “Pizza actually originated in north Africa and was adapted by Italians.”

You didn’t swallow spoof, did you?

TUBE travellers may have seen this advertisement, which purports to be promoting something called “The Clear Pill” – a miracle drug that promises to help users “unlock their potential”. 

Diary has witnessed commuters staring in confusion at the ad – which warns that side-effects “will include paralysis, psychosis, amnesia, extreme sexual appetite, brain damage, irreversible coma, blackouts and sudden death”.

It is, of course, a spoof. 

Do some digging online and you will find it is a clever marketing ploy for the upcoming film Limitless, starring Bradley Cooper and Robert de Niro.

The movie tells the story of a down and out writer who takes the experimental pill.