CCC's Street Art Contest # 190: Window to Paris

I found this graffiti during a walk along the right bank of the Neva River. I'm going to tell about this walk in more detail later, now I want to show only one of the sights, but in great detail. The neighbourhood I was walking through has a historical name "Okhta" and at first glance it has nothing to do with France. But the peculiar "Window", through which you can see the streets of Paris, appeared here.

This graffiti is not new, and some of the colours have faded or even disappeared under the influence of bad weather. This did not disturb the overall harmony. The artists stylised their work under the artistic style of Impressionism, which is characterised by some understatement. However, all the important details have been preserved and are easily recognisable - the balloon in the sky next to the Eiffel Tower, the signs of bakeries and coffee shops, the striped awnings above the shop windows and the white cat.

The graffiti occupies two blank walls of an old building. The courtyard is quite small, and it took me a while to find the best angles: I couldn't get far enough away to get a general view of the whole mural. Either parked cars or an abstract figure made of intertwined pipes would appear in the foreground. Finally, I found a point from which I was able to take photos at a slight angle. After that I took some close-up photos - this proved to be much easier. There are no leaves on the trees yet, and the tree branches are not an insurmountable obstacle.

The buildings that served as the canvas for this graffiti are nothing special. Reference books refer to such buildings as "ordinary buildings". Nevertheless, the architectural history of this neighbourhood has interesting features. The building was built more than a hundred years ago and the facade of this house looked at Georgievskaya Street. During the redevelopment and dense building of the neighbourhood in the XX century, the old street disappeared - in its place is now a narrow passage inside the neighbourhood. This house has been preserved from the old street, and the name of the garden located a little further away reminds us of this street. Now the two parts of this building stand in the centre of the block as small separate buildings, but the blank walls of the buildings hint that the original layout of the street was quite different.

This is my entry for the CCC’s Street Art Contest #190 organized by @digi-me.