Ottawa's Elmaks sees himself as a man who sees what's ugly and makes it beautiful. "I do it to cheer people up, improve public space and introduce a little bit of randomness and joy into the every day." He feels that not only should he be allowed to continue his work, he should be recognized and praised for it.
The fact is, though, that most of the present work on these sites is not appreciated by Ottawa residents in their community. Street artists must work harder at individual styles and respect the values of communities if they are to be taken as seriously in public places as they want to be.
While the city is spending 1% of its construction budget on official artwork, up to 6-figure sums per artist, all of the work shown here is done for free because the artists love doing it. It would be great if the city would assign some of our unfriendly raw concrete surfaces to single artists chosen from among the best of these. With competitions in place, we could look for more originality from them. In the meantime, I'll feature the most original ones I find here.
The sites are organised from east to west.
