A Couple Holding Hands in the Street
Street Art Break in VR
This painting is located at 28 Princelet Street, off Brick Lane in the Borough of Tower Hamlets, where the Shoreditch area has the highest concentration of street art of any neighborhood in London.
Tower Hamlets is also a very multicultural part of the city, including the highest proportion of Muslims in any local jurisdiction in England.
The Artist’s name is … Stik. This is what he does. Stick figures. He has been internationally famous for at least a decade.
He created A Couple Holding Hands in the Street in 2010 and it is still there today, with graffiti embellishments and removals over the years.
Do you look at the stick figures and think, ‘I could do that’?
A Couple Holding Hands in the Street is popular in the local Muslim communities in part because of what it depicts but in some ways even more because of how it is depicted.
Stik discussed his idea with local people and before he started painting, he posted a public notice that explained how he intended to proceed with respect for the Koran:
“Flat two-dimensional illustrations, deliberately unrealistic, no illusion of depth”
Stik does not create realistic images of human beings, which the Koran forbids.
Maybe his style was born of necessity, as Banksy claims his stenciling technique was — Stik draws human-like figures very quickly so he doesn’t get caught. Somehow they manage to be expressive and to feel right.
The girl in the niqab and the white boy speak for the community about what is possible. Stik says everything that’s visible from the street, he does for free, after he talks with local residents about what it’s like living there.
He shows the changing face of London, which is not always a popular pursuit.
But in 2017, A Couple Holding Hands in the Street was voted the UK’s 17th-favourite piece of art in a Guardian poll. It placed just ahead of a Henry Moore and just behind a work by Thomas Gainsborough. It was not a Street Art competition — it was an All Art competition.
People like Stik’s way.
Tom’s work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, the New England Journal of Medicine, or anything New at all.
He only publishes in obscure journals and, once upon a time, PBS Program Guides. Otherwise he just gives his work a URL and sends it packing on the web at places like Medium and Sub-Stack, where he enjoys a modest following.
