Robert Montgomery’s Old Street Billboards

“All I want to do in life is to be able to pay the rent and make the billboards,” artist Robert Montgomery said in an interview with The Independent last Friday. ”That’s my complete and utter ambition.”

There’s three billboard along Old Street right now as part of an exhibition showing off his poetry in a simple caps-on white on black find. These ones are legal, though occasionally he illegally plasters his poetry paste-ups over advertisements. But he’s a fully trained artist with Venice Biennale on his CV and hardly be cast in the category of “street artist”, though his work normally is found on the streets.  So I took a stroll over the weekend and took a few photos to share with you:

In the same interview, he says, “One of those texts is very much a testimony to the positive things I think Occupy are doing. It starts, “There are wooden houses on land in far-away places that don’t cost much money, and strings of lights that make paths to them gently, and do not turn off the stars. And 100 black flags of anarchists held up at night 100 miles apart.”

It’s the idea that rows of tents in front of St Pauls are guarding our future – or trying to. I find that whole thing very moving. I found Giles Fraser resigning from the Church of England in support of the Occupy movement, incredibly moving.  The church taking sympathy with what they’re doing is really significant. It shows that the concerns of middle England are not too far away from the concerns of Occupy. I worked a lot with the Stop The War coalition over the years and I did several pieces with them and some of the marches. It was lots of middle class, middle-aged people from the home counties marching.”

Any thoughts?

Lots more on his website.