I never knew there was so much to it… Street Art is well worth a second look. Not least since a lot of it tricks the eye – through largeness, smallness or seeming banality. It’s clever stuff.

On my last trip to the library – on an impulse – I borrowed “The Mammoth Book of Street Art” by JAKe – pages and pages of photos of street art from London, Paris, New York and more.

From spray paint to stencils, posters (aka wheatpasting) to tiny figures and installations, Street Artists are constantly playing with perspective, graphics, text and figures in fascinating, fun and challenging ways.

And it’s been going on for years, under our very noses where we live. We have a stencilled rose on the wall next to our house and ‘guerrilla gardeners’ transforming railway embankments and street trees all around us with flowers and planting.

Once you start looking, it’s everywhere. There’s a long nosed Pinocchio on a stairwell in a forbidding estate I cycle through every morning and I used to love the ‘here’ ‘now’ on a big local housing block until it got graffitied to oblivion.

Street Art, done right, doesn’t deface – it makes you think and it makes you smile.

Here are some of JAKe’s choices I liked best:

Classic simplicity from Stik:

And from Dave the Chimp:

The king of stencils Bansky:

Poster art from Faile from the USA:

Playful pixels from Kello:

Miniature tenements (as also above) from Evol:

And tiny people from Slinkachu: