BLU

Blu is the pseudonym created by an Italian street artist who has deliberately chosen to conceal his true identity. Consequently, little is known about the artist's history and technique. He has been active in the street art scene since 1999-beginning in the suburbs of Bologna and gradually spreading on an international scale to countries including, but not limited to, England, Germany, Spain, and locations in Central and South America. At the start of his career, Blu's technique was limited to the use of spray paint. However, by 2001, the artist had developed a characteristic style-now painting with house paint and rollers mounted on telescopic poles. Blu's characters are often huge human figures who "look as is they were borrowed from comics or [an] arcade game world. The recurring themes of his imagery play on the distortion of the human figure." (2) His work has an illustrative and almost surreal quality-often satirical or ironic, and always larger than life. "Blu’s aesthetic search is motivated by a belief in an open source philosophy, persistent in its anarchical revolt against contemporary art conventions and unique in beauty, and is undoubtedly one of the most interesting in our visual culture." (Naomi Klein, 2)

Blu: Hombre Banano, Managua, Nicaragua, 2005

Though his murals are quite popular, Blu is probably best know for his work with animation. His most recent project "Big Bang Big Boom" (July 2010) has received over 1,113,700 views on YouTube. Blu states on his blog (commenting on the scale and effort of the project)- "After months of work and hundreds of buckets of paint the new wall-painted animation is ready!" Below is a link to the animation.

Big Bang Big Boom- "A short unscientific story about evolution and his consequences."


References:
1. http://blublu.org/index.htm
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu_%28artist%29#cite_ref-35