Hookedblog are currently in the beautiful coastal Belgium city of Ostend for the first edition of The Crystal Ship Festival, a contemporary street art festival with a focus on art in public space. The festival launched on the 28th March with artists painting until the 10th April 2016 in the city of Ostend. An all star line up of 25 international and national artists decended on the city to create large scale murals and installations which have formed an artistic trail right across Ostend.

While most street art festivals these days tend to focus on large scale murals it was refreshing to see that the festival curator Bjørn Van Poucke has included a number of artists in the program who were working at street level with paste-ups and stencils. Two of the invited artists Polcosmo working with pasteups and Jaune working with stencils were also both Belgian artists another plus as it's great to see local as well as international artist represented at the festival.

The inclusion of local artists saw us here at Hookedblog introduced to the stencil work of Jaune for the first time, we were not aware of the Belgian artists work prior to our visit to Ostend but since the introduction we will be keeping an eye on this artists work via his Jaune_Art Instagram account.



Throughout the duration of the festival Jaune installed close to 40 stencil works right across the city with many of the districts walls seeing the addition of stencil works from the artist. A large number of these multi layered stencil works featured characters based on the Belgian street cleaning teams with their faces sometimes replaced with those of friend, family and the artist himself. Considering the volume of work installed by the artist it was impressive to see that no two pieces of work were the same, with a number of site specific works created for the festival.

We were fortunate enough to be allowed to accompany the artist with our camera on one of his stencil missions in which he created this large scale work pictured below, which saw the city workers sailing across an ocean of trash on a gondola!!



With the artist choosing not to have his work listed on the official Crystal Ship festival map, visitors really had to keep their eyes open as they crossed the city checking out some of the larger murals around the city. We here at Hookedblog were walking an average of 10 miles a day while in Ostend bouncing around the city from artist to artist checking in on their progress and only managed to discover a small selection of the works installed by Jaune! Some of the works we stumbled upon around Oostende are featured below.

Jaune collaborated with fellow Belgian artist PolCosmo on this work located outside the Crystal Ship HQ.


Artists who took part in this first edition of the Crystal Ship Festival also included
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1010 (DE) - AGOSTINO IACURCI (IT) - CYRCLE (US)(Previously on Hookedblog) -DISORDERLINE (B) - ELIAN (AR)(Previously on Hookedblog) - ELLA & PITR (FR) - EVERSIEMPRE (AR) - FAITH47 (SA)(Previously on Hookedblog) - FINTAN MAGEE (AU)(Previously on Hookedblog) - GUIDO VAN HELTEN (AU)(Previously on Hookedblog) - HERR SEELE (B) - JAUNE (B) - JAZ (AR)(Previously on Hookedblog) - LOCATELLI (B) - MISTER FIKSIT (B) - NOIR (B) - NUART PRESENTS BIANCOSHOCK (IT) & ISAAC CORDAL (ES) - PIXELPANCHO (IT)(Previously on Hookedblog) - POL COSMO (B) - ROBERT MONTGOMERY (UK) - ROA (B)(Previously on Hookedblog) - SIEGFRIED VYNCK (B) - SMATES (B) - ZIO ZIEGLER (US)