Upfest is a street art and graffiti festival held in Bristol in south west UK. It's the largest of its kind in Europe and held every year in the past 15 years apart from 2020 and 2021 when the dreaded Covid hit us. Despite Bristol being my local city, I first learnt of the festival on Steemit from 
Greville Smyth Park
This year's festival was held this weekend but the new murals were all painted a few weeks ago. The main venue was inside Greville Smyth Park, and it was perfect for people to hang around under the sun during the day when they weren't wandering around the city looking at the murals. There were a lot of foods stalls here, live performance and live painting by around 400 artists creating smaller (compared to the mural) pieces of work. It was really interesting to see their differnt creative styles how they all worked differently. The vibe was great here, I grabbed some lunch, hanged around a while to watch the live painting then left to see the best part of Upfest.
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The gem of Upfest are the 157 murals scattered around the area, all of which are within walking distance. Around half of these are newly painted this year by artists from all over the world. I didn't see the world's most famous graffiti artist, Banksy, on the name list, perhaps he's painting under a pseudonym? By the way, if you didn't know already, it is generally believed that Banksy is from Bristol!!! Yeah!!!!
I took a lot of photos over the weekend, but let me show you a selection of my favourite
I really like this row of houses, and I think its the longest consecutive houses with murals that I saw.
This is a tribute to President Zelenskyy from Ukraine by Karl Read from UK. He is ripping open his shirt to show a superman logo in blue and yellow.
Opposite the road from President Zelenskyy is the mural of Love Local or lose lcoal. Nowadays there is a lot of focus on building and supporting your local community and this is a great message to support that.
And I'll let you admire the rest because I'm just in awe of the talent and how the artist can turn a relative run down part of the city into such a hip trendy are open air museum.
If you're ever visiting Bristol I highly recommend you to drop by the area to see these creations. I've pinned the location on Pinmapple here. The murals are around all the time, and I imagine if you come next year, there will be new ones as well. Hope you enjoyed the tour of Upfest 2022 in my home city.
