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IN PAINT WE TR
If you haven’t already seen some new, amazing, street art popping up in the city then you really do need to get out more – especially now that lockdown is over! From May 2021, a new street art project, In Paint We Trust, has seen new artworks appearing in unique spaces across the city centre and the neighbourhoods of Coventry and Warwickshire. Artists have been animating along pathways and revitalising walls giving audiences a chance to explore. DLUXE Magazine’s, Rebecca Rhodes, talked to Event Producers Street Art Strategy’s Michael Batchelor and Melissa Smith to find out more about it.
50 dluxe-magazine.co.uk
So how did this all come together? Michael: Well we came together as a group to promote street art because we've all been doing different types of public art sort of separately and all been friends, all been at the same events and we wanted to do something as big in Coventry as what we’d seen elsewhere. Our mission really was to engage more people with street and contemporary art so we looked at how we could do that with a strong community angle. Following funding applications and meetings with councils we soon realised that coming together to do this as a group would be more successful. Singular people were not having much joy, so we joined our forces.
Melissa: I've been really passionate about street art for years and like Mick was saying, we were visiting all of these festivals in other cities and really wanted to bring it home to our own city so that’s why we joined forces. I'm not a street artist yet, but I'm a potential street artist in the making! I'm a doodler and an illustrator, so I do smaller pieces of work. So Street Art Strategy are myself, Mick, Andy, Claire who's also a street artist like Mick, and then Jay Holder, who is deejay and music producer. All of our skill sets combine really nicely and it’s been really exciting working together to bring the street art movement to Coventry. It's also about providing local street artists with opportunities as well so we’ve
