Nothing better than kicking off 2008 with a big shootout.

BNN-101 TV approached us to supply our worst painting for destruction. We picked a hangover-paintsession canvas from the past and did some interviews about it and our work. Finally, we put it in the cellar of our fresh new squat atelier, got our Smith & Wesson's and semi-automatic police crap guns and pumped a leadload of ammo through our crap painting. The BNN item will be online soon, we will post a link later, for now, some pics:

Today Oles, P.Bloem, Pinwin, CES53 & Dr Chess went to the TU-Eindhoven for an ice carving experiment. Students from the Technical University developed a way to colour ice and make it several layers thick, creating a sub zero canvas. By carving in it the coloured layers were exposed and the deeper you carve, the more colours you come across.For the presentation we were asked to try it out with a good choice of tools. All this as a try out for a huge Red Bull festival next year. 

A cold and windy day in Scheveningen with Brasilian crew Nação and mr. Thor.

For a construction site at the end of the Nieuwe Binnenweg in Rotterdam we painted a wall of 21 meters long. We painted this wall in summertime with the crew, but was placed this week.

Friday the 16th of november the exhibition 'De stad als canvas' (the city as a canvass) opened in artspace Tent. The show is about the history of wall painting in Rotterdam and shows work from Simon Schrikker, Antistrot, Lucky Dubz, reproductions of Chilean political paintings from the 70's and six big canvasses from yours truely, Lastplak. The same night the book 'Mooi van Ver' (beautiful from a distance) by Siebe Thissen was presented. It focusses on the history of wall painting in our city and containes over 300 pictures of old and new paintings. The show will run till january 10th 2008, so go check it out!

On the 9th of November we had the opening of our expo in Vienna @ gallery Inoperable. Therefore we decided this was a great opportunity to go there with the whole crew for a little teambuilding holiday.

First Torrie, Yen, Sterf and Mayb flew to Vienna to put out the warning signs.  A week later Oles, Sake, P.Bloem, Acab and Pinwin joined in. Already in the first week we were dragged from party to party and from opening to vernissage. We saw a nice Martha Cooper “Playground” photo expo and a street art show featuring works of most Austrian street artists. Here we made some great connections with the locals to keep us busy in the next two weeks.

Following directions some Scandinavian train-tourists gave us, we ended up in an old factory with big empty halls, becoming a local private Hall of Fame for painting, or tearing apart stuff… A nice place some of us went back to several times.

In the meantime we were collecting all kinds of trash, traffic signs and posters from the streets we would (re-)paint in the evening and morning time to use for our expo.

Our friend DJ Phekto invited us to come on his radio show on FM4 to promote our expo. Our second delegation barely set foot on Austrian ground before they were already dragged to the Rundfunkhaus for the interview. Loaded with Ottakringers we talked some onzin and had a great laugh.

The other day we went to another huge abandoned factory outside Vienna with our guide Malr to paint some nice spots, this factory was so big you can get lost or die easily. Coming back to Vienna that night we had some great snitzels with the crew.

The next day we started to work on our expo, Inoperable isn't a big gallery, so we had to squeeze in all our stuff. In the evening we were again invited to DJ Phekt’s FM4 live hip hop show. Besides listening to some dope fresh tracks by Jay-Z and Vadim we propped our expo and invited all local drug dealers to our expo. They even played a track from our LASTPLAK rapper: YEN! After the show we had a hook up with the Tag Tool team and got to play around with their installation.

The opening of the expo was great, a lot of people showed up and there was enough beer. We also sold some of our work. From there it went to beers, stickering and more beers. In between we did our greatest  interview ever, but the raw material was confiscated by local authorities. Nevertheless the camera crew kept following us in the next days and even arranged a shutter for us to paint. Doing this, we thought the construction wall across the street also could use some color, so we helped the neighbors out with this, without asking though… A few minutes later the police showed up, but off course we got away by signing her ticket book and giving some stickers for the kids.

To keep us from getting bored in between our activities, we decided that the kid's (style) paintings in the bedroom and toilet of our apartment could use some additions… Luckily the hostel owner liked it and we are welcome to stay for a week for free next time we come over and paint the whole apartment ! Thank you Happy Hostel, we had a great time and you were very patient with us!

On the last day we went to the Donau channel Hall of Fame and painted a piece next to it with all our left over paint. Then we ate our last sausage and went to the airport to go home.

At the Grotemarkt in Rotterdam's city centre we and some invited artists painted a 100 meter long house-block. In summer 2008 they gonna break it down. 

Today Boortorrie, Dizl, Pinwin, Yen & Grrt painted a shutter and another van in sessions because of the rain in Maassluis.

After that we had some Finkbrau's and great food @ Grrt's house.

Friday night we painted a van for Jeroen, who organised a BMX jam in Rotterdam's city centre. He left us alone with a fridge full of ice cold half liter beers for more then five hours… Thanks!!

Saturday we went to the skate jam in Delft and painted 5 Dunny's with the crew and Foxy Lady.

For more pictures, check www.fontanel.nl/gallery/skatejam/

For Unilever we painted 20 chairs, a table and a wall for their new head-office in Rotterdam.

Here some pictures of the chairs. The rest will follow later when everything is placed inside the office and we get treated to an unlimited suply of caviar, champagne and 50% of the stocks.