When I first looked at this image, I thought it was a photo of a street artist painting, on the side of a building, an incredible Van Gogh-inspired mural. After digging a little deeper, I was surprised to find out that the whole thing was actually painted on canvas by Nowart, aka Arnaud Rabier. Huge credit goes to the French street artist who created this realistic scene with a paintbrush.
“The foundation of my work is humanity and my main ethos comes from hip-hop culture: peace, love and unity, Nowart tells Global Street Art. “There's a message behind my art. It's about unity and how to make people live together, addressing meeting each other, love, brotherhood, emotions, water, fire, earth, wind and the cosmos.
“Complexity of mind, complexity of faces, of the lives behind the faces – these elements make my portraits rich and colorful. My colors come from what my emotions are when I'm creating. It's not a conceptual art, but a perceptual art!
“Van Gogh is an inspiration, like many others. Van Gough painted [near] the outside of the factory I painted the inside of, 100 years before me. After that there were other things that linked me to him so I studied his life and let that inspiration do the rest!”
