Defacing a Street (Artist)
How one man, anonymous until now and on a journey of sobriety, is beautifying the streets of London.
This article pairs nicely with episode 2 of the Move Over Mother Theresa podcast (found here on Spotify as well as elsewhere), titled “Florist, on graffiti, ego and sobriety”. It’s been a pleasure to interview, get to know, and now write about this man.
It’s almost midnight and I’m 5 beers and a baby Guinness down. Enough to steal a little happiness from tomorrow. Not too much to forget on my walk home through East London that I best be holding my phone a little tighter than usual. The streets are Victorian, mostly. Beautiful buildings aging well but ageing nonetheless. There’s also modern architecture that I notice more for its brutalism than its charm, and as is the case everywhere in 2025, too many shops lie empty. Those family stores and independent coffee shops came and went with soaring rents. Even that high street bank on my right packed up and left - finding cheaper ways to spend its billions online rather than off. Suits suiting themselves, primarily.
I stop.
There’s a man. Hooded and huddled, almost bowing down to the front side of this bank. Is he…. grieving its loss? No, silly. Pissing? Eh! Probably. But his hands are busy. Oh god. Ah, wait a second. He has a glue gun thing and a silhouette surrounded by colour surrounded by concrete surrounded by night sky and this, well, it’s all just weird as hell. And entirely magical.
He turns. Throws me a look. Smiles, nervously. Then splits.
Life Imitates Art
When was the last time you fictionalised a memory based on an Instagram video you found mid zombie scroll? Statistically it should be often. The average Brit scrolls 914 metres a day. That’s over 9 times the height of Big Ben, or 6,600 phone screens stacked one on top of another. Consider view times averaging just a second or two and that becomes a video consumption number in the many thousands. Every. Day. This is a lot of material to capture your imagination and spark it into action.
Yet it’s rare, at least for a cynic and social media captive like me, that a video evokes such a fantasy. Even those idyllic looking travel influencers feel like wolves in sheep’s clothing to me. Baiting my attention. My fawning. My lifetime customer value.
But some content doesn’t bring out the bell-end in me. So to speak. It unearths someone doing something brilliant and communicating it brilliantly. It becomes a window to a million questions all of which I need to know the answers to. Climbing through that window and into the life it teases becomes the fantasy (or a set up for a Substack post, as it now seems).
After watching one such video from an account called @florist.ldn, a street artist producing and installing often irreverent and always pixel perfect mosaics across sad looking urban spots, I wanted answers. So I did a little slip-and-slide into his DMs and we arranged to meet.
Street Art & Sobriety
On his account, he’s faceless. IRL, I learnt as we met, he has a face and it drinks water. His craft is a gift and so is his art. Literally. He gives colour and culture out of his own pocket, inspired by a lifelong love for mosaics and, as he subtly alludes to in his videos but spoke in more depth on during our recent pod interview, a journey of self discovery after years of alcohol abuse.
Until now his identity has been hidden but I’m honoured to have his permission to share with you his name, his story, and my take on why this man is someone to admire.
Meet Daniel Edney.
Content vs Context
A purist’s view on the experience of art is that it’s a personal interpretation of sensory inputs with cognitive and emotional outputs. That’s what it is and that’s what it should be. The context is also the content, though. The setting, the story, the price, the process - it all shapes the mind’s view and the heart’s feel. Traditionally, much of this context is stripped back so as to not get in the way of the purist’s ideal. White walled galleries, sterilised exhibition guides, and their cute little mini me’s; those business card sized bits of wall text that say not a lot about anything.
Clearly, Street Art breaks away from this. Art in situ becomes a commentary on, and embellishment of, its environment. Its story has broader themes of urbanisation, urban culture and an often underground scene cultivating within it. Anonymity is rife and often fair game behaviour given the greyscale legal palette these artists operate within. Anonymity can also be a trope made alluring by Banksy and others, which Daniel explained to us is his most likely motivation for keeping his name and face private until now. I wonder, though, if hiding identities for either of these reasons is mostly the hangover of hiding context - that purist’s blood spilling out from the Tate to tarmac.
The medium of video and the maniacal consumption of it in short form has blown open the expression of art context, and I wonder if anyone is taking advantage of this with as much skill as Daniel. I could, for example, watch Paul Cocksedge’s Reels / TitToks / Shorts all day - but this is an artist explaining context rather than storyfying it. Daniel does the latter.
Art and the Art of Video
Within the narrative of a typical Daniel video is all the standard, expected stuff - scoping spots, producing his pieces, and sneakily installing them. What elevates a typical Daniel video, though, is a combination of absurdist storylines, funny-as-fuck one liners, and out-of-the-blue moments of deep, deep humility. His edit style is short form mastery - a fact that’s nuts considering he only started learning to edit in February this year. All in all it’s raw, real, and revelatory as a lighthouse for how content (his mosaics) and context (his videos) combine as the sum total of artistic expression in the age of social media and the potential it offers.
The Purpose(s)
I do it for myself… and to make others happy
We look out for content creators who are led in some way by purpose. Voices - whether activists, advocates or artists - who create, not for clicks, but for a passion to contribute to, and serve, a rapidly evolving culture in ways that benefit it and therefore us collectively. Daniel’s art is a contribution to both streets and screens; spaces equally in need of what he provides them. But his B-Story might just be the story that really shifts a consciousness in others. I am the son of an alcoholic who incredibly and against all odds got sober only after my childhood had been and gone, and so I can you what Daniel getting there earlier must mean for his boy. As an artist finding ways to weave his context into his art, it’s this part of his story that will ‘shape the mind’s view and the heart’s feel’ as much as any other. He may never know the people who’ll benefit from this example he is setting for others. But it will not just be me - standing in front of a mosaic on a bank, in awe of the art and the man behind it.
This guy sounds incredibly interesting!