Flx is a contemporary fine artist and muralist, who lives and works in Bristol, UK. A veteran of the first wave of British graffiti and street art, he began painting walls in Bristol in 1984, aged 15, before going on to study for a degree in Visual Communication at the University of Central England at Birmingham, where he graduated in 1993.
After studying for a Diploma in Youth Work at City of Bristol College in 2002, he combined his arts practice and youth work as a community arts facilitator, painting murals and delivering related youth arts projects, across Bristol and the UK, then subsequently as far afield as South East Asia and East Africa.
In 2012 Flx co-founded the community murals collective Paintsmiths of Bristol, whose large-scale works celebrating the life of Nelson Mandela or parodying the ‘special relationship’ between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, gained global media attention; whilst their murals in schools and community settings focused on celebrating those communities in everything from aerosol and masonry paint to retroreflective road marking materials. Currently his focus is on my personal studio practice and solo mural/public art projects.
Flx’s practice explores themes of synergy and interconnectivity, both conceptually and visually – through the playful interaction of colours and forms. Forced into an intensive phase of experimentation and development during lockdown, his practice has taken him on a journey from making multi-layered abstract acrylic painted ‘colourscapes’ into an evolving, personal visual lexis.
Both abstract and representational, collections of silhouetted cultural and autobiographical references take form in overcrowded spaces, some shouting their meanings, whilst their neighbours keep them private and coded.
The inspiration for his design for the Nelson Street Mural came from the famous local myth of Goram and Vincent: engineers, rivals and towering heroes of the region. The legend of Bristol’s giant brothers, Goram and Vincent, tells of how the siblings competed against one another, to dig the Avon Gorge and Blaise Valley, in a race to drain an enormous lake, that supposedly once covered a huge area of land between Bristol and Bradford-upon-Avon. The giants were set the task by a local woman, Avona, to help her decide which of them to marry. The wiser of the two, Vincent, paced himself and used all his engineering knowledge to dig the far superior channel through the rock to form the Avon Gorge. The wisest of the three, of course, was Avona, who delegated the entire task to the brothers, and got both valleys dug without ever lifting a finger.
His thought process when designing this mural was quite simple: whilst undertaking a site visit he looked up at the multi-storey brutalist architecture surrounding him and spotted Stik’s twin giants (on the other side of the street) still looking for each other, 10 year after they were painted at the See No Evil street art festival in 2011 (where he also painted). They reminded him of the story of Goram and Vincent, so he went away and looked them up. With the concept and rough drawings under his belt, he set about creating a design that encompassed and worked with the huge window in the middle of the wall. Having this fit inside the giants’ chests and stomachs seemed the best solution. When considering the meaning behind the story and its relevance to Bristol, it felt like a good metaphor for the city’s growth and how it evolved, with a combination of brains, brawn and ingenuity making it happen.
Instagram – @felix_flx_braun
Website – www.felixflxbraun.co.uk