Brighton based Recreative Signs delivers a notable landmark-scale window mural by The Postman at Noel Gallagher’s North London Studio…

A chance meeting between two people with a shared interest in street-art in 2018 gave impetus to the birth of The Postman. The two may today be known by many names, and lots, or all, are aliases. They’re private individuals, they work anonymously together and with a growing circle of friends known as The Postman Collective.

Music and pop culture permeate The Postman’s works and it’s out there and on the streets if you want to see it. Positive and inclusive in nature, the works are not museum pieces and they’ll fade away given time. They’re transient to the extent The Postman’s fans seek them out before they disappear.

The Postman’s medium is complex sharing elements drawn from photography, spray-paint, stencils of various types and collage. What you might infer is that any medium used with the support of another has the legs and capacity to be taken further than any element unaided. You’d be right. The Postman’s work is distinctive and individual in the extreme. The Postman collaborates in a big way with other artists, including notable photographers, and so continually expands its knowledge and repertoire.

Much of The Postman’s work exists in homage to their own heroes and is celebrated in enduring form in works that are acquired and collected whereas their work on the streets is free for all to enjoy and is never for sale. They also accept commissions to produce individual works formed around their ideology and medium. One of the most recent came from fan and collector, former Oasis frontman, Noel Gallagher.

Noel made contact with The Postman looking for an exterior mural design for his North London Studio. The work was to be rooted in The Postman’s distinctive look and feel and centre around images of Noel’s heroes including, among others, John Lennon and David Bowie. The Postman delivered a work that again succeeds in practically signing itself and yet is very clearly a wonderful and evocative one-off.

Delivering the physical manifestation of the work involved rather more durable media than is the norm for The Postman’s needs and applications, and Brighton Based Recreative Signs responded to the request to produce it having been introduced along the word-of-mouth communications network.

“The files we were sent were massive,” said Recreative’s Richard Earley “ they comprised many layers and it took a bit of effort to reconcile them into something ready to print.” The Recreative team decided to proof the job on Metamark MD5 laminated with its matching gloss laminate MetaGuard MG-700. The result was spot-on in terms of fidelity and definition but, at Richard’s urging, didn’t make the cut. It was felt that the gloss introduced a feel not evident

in The Postman’s other exterior works which are often paper-based and thus matt. One more proof later, this time on HP Latex Printed Metamark MD5 laminated with MetaGuard MG-700 in matt, and approval to proceed was given.

The Recreative team, in the shape of Richard and Ryan Earley, arrived bright and early at Noel Gallagher’s studio to apply the finished work and first delivered a meticulous cleaning to the glazing ahead of application. The total of seventeen panes took about two hours to fit and Gallagher and his photographer daughter, Anais, and The Postman were there to document the occasion and see the mural installed.

The MD5 mural will, thanks to the digital print medium last longer than most of The Postman’s street-art works. If and when it does retire though, the mural can claim a life beyond the one it enjoys gracing the studio windows. Metamark will retrieve it and recycle its content through the MetaStream process turning it into a useful article that can itself be recycled time and time again. That said, it’s quite possible that a few scraps of it could find a way into a memento for Recreative Signs to display.

Richard Earley and the team at Recreative Signs are no strangers to pushing hard on artistic boundaries. The company has built a reputation for producing notable signage in self-coloured materials, primarily Metamark M7. Its wanderings into the realms of print though show that the company is a well rounded producer and its application skills are much in evidence too.