Hookedblog has just returned from a long weekend in Waterford city, one of Ireland’s oldest cities on the South East coast.

Waterford Walls Festival, Ireland
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We were in town to check out the fourth edition of the Waterford Walls International Street Art festival. Hookedblog had such an amazing time in Waterford at last year's festival we made the trip back for the 2018 edition, which saw founder Edel Tobin and her team host some 50 international and national street artists who transformed the city into one large outdoor gallery over the duration of the festival.

Artist Dank Kitchener in Ireland
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A regular on the streets of East London, Street Artist and Illustrator Dan Kitchener aka DANK was one of the many artists invited to paint on walls across Waterford City. At 35ft x 20ft this striking new large-scale mural was painted over three days and according to Kitchener is “definitely one of my top 5 murals painted worldwide to date”.

He continues to say, “This mural for me, is a perspective I wanted to paint for over a year now, and was looking for the right wall to show this low down shot, looking up, as one girl crossing the road sees me taking the photo, laying in a puddle and looks at me inquisitively! I loved this moment in time, laying in the rain and water, the neon waves of water rippling around me, small rivers of colours in the gutters...beautiful Shinjuku, Tokyo”

From a rainy Shinjuku scene to a sunny street in Waterford, the vibrant neon-like colours really pop in the Irish sunshine and unlike some of the one-day “speed paintings,’ as Kitchener refers to them, this mural is packed with a crazy amount of detail that we don’t always see in some of the other murals we have seen from him.