Street art in Belleville

This morning Mum and I went off together to Belleville, which is an area of Paris that is famous not only because of it's where the singer Edith Piaf was born at the beginning of the 20th century, and because it was the setting of a famous short French childeren's film called The Red Balloon in the 1950's, but more recently it's become a big centre for street art or graffiti--well not the sort of graffiti you see normally in Australia, like tags and writing and stuff, but actual paintings, many of them done with stencils, or 'pochoirs' as the French call it. Anyway cos Mum's writing her Guide to Unusual Paris, this was to be part of it--and also it was for me for my art project for school--and I liked what I saw there so much that I decided I'd make it the focus of my art project in fact. Anyway we went round Belleville in this big circuit--it's much shabbier than where we're staying but it was still pretty interesting, and finding the street art unexpectedly was really fun! It all started in the 1980's apparently and it's kept going for ages, with artists such as Nemo and Mosko and Jerome Mesnager. I'm putting up here some pictures of what I saw, but also here's a link to this really good blog I found, which is all about the history of it and stuff and which is going to be so useful for me!

http://parisstreetart.blogspot.com/