Brilliant Street Murals Look Like Vibrant Fabric Billowing Across City Walls

Painted Flowing Fabric on Building by Rosie Woods

London-based street artist Rosie Woods creates evocative work that flows across the walls of any city she visits. Teetering on the line between realism and abstraction, her compositions look like colorful cloths billowing across the architecture. And by selecting vibrant hues, Woods allows the pieces to pop and immediately transform the environment.

Woods takes inspiration from the desire to be alive and purposefully paints to “explore the meeting point between our physical and spiritual experiences as human beings.”

“My paintings look to express the depth, growth, and complexity of the mind as well as its ability to encompass both light and dark spaces emotionally,” she tells My Modern Met. “I'd like to think you can ‘feel' my artwork with your eyes.”

In Grenoble, she painted a series of three murals that are connected by their color palette. There, her translucent “cloth” takes on an iridescent quality reminiscent of soap bubbles. Slithering and sliding down the walls, the paintings lead the eye across the architecture and emphasize the fluid nature of the work.

Other murals use even bolder colors, but have the same attention to fluid lines and harmony of forms that results in an aesthetically pleasing result. For Woods, painting in public can present challenges, but she feels that these bring out the best in her work. In the end, if the public can enjoy what she's created, it's all worthwhile.

“It is a privilege to paint in public and bring art to people that perhaps wouldn’t encounter it otherwise,” she shares. “When painting, I often get asked, ‘What is it?' and my answer is, ‘It’s entirely up to you, where does your imagination take you?' I’m not trying to express a particular narrative; instead, I am attempting to connect to that pure space within yourself, below the surface that exists like a flame or a whirlpool and is capable of so much.”