Selling a unique range of hand drawn cityscape artworks, Staves Art was founded by artist Ben Staves in 2017. Ben designs unique maps of cities across the UK and beyond – including York, London, New York and Paris – portraying the famous streets and landmarks in an unusual 3D globe style.
Each design can take anywhere up to 100 hours to create – with Ben hand-drawing intricate, detailed maps of the city and its iconic buildings to give a totally unique take on the city skyline.
From originally pursuing a career in Architecture, Ben created the first of his iconic city globe designs whilst studying at Northumbria University back in 2012, and over the last nine years has gone on to develop this passion for art into a successful business. Pre-lockdown, Ben was trading on Shambles Market three days a week – with his father and uncle helping him run the business both on market stalls and online. Ben is now one of the artists whose work is on sale in the brand new Visit York e shop – which offers a carefully curated collection of some of the best locally created York gifts, crafts and merchandise. The shop features Ben’s hand-drawn ‘York Globe’ artwork – a unique and original take on a city map design with the print available to buy on high quality greetings cards and cushions.
During lockdown, Ben has been kept busy with new commissions and sales via his revamped website – www.stavesart.com – which offers a wide variety of different cityscape locations as well as popular sporting venues (and even fantasy worlds!)
Ben Staves explains, “I began creating the cityscape artwork when I was in University as part of my Architecture degree and since then I’ve been delighted to be able to develop this into a business. What began as a hobby, and something that I absolutely love doing, is now my full-time job and it’s been great to see how it’s grown over the years.
We started trading on Shambles Market towards the end of 2019 and found it a really wonderful way to promote our products and get out and meet people. The atmosphere on the market is fantastic and it’s a great community of traders on there – offering a mix of really cool products and street food and we love being part of it!
It’s also been great to be a part of the new Visit York e shop and have our York pieces on there for people who want to pick up something a little bit different as a souvenir or gift. The artwork has a huge amount of detail and lovers of York will be able to spot lots of their favourite sights and locations.
Whilst lockdown has been challenging, with us not being able to do the shows and stalls that we had planned, on the plus side it has given me time to work on creating new pieces and developing the online side of the business. Sales via our website have been doing really well and it’s been great to see people supporting small independent businesses when purchasing gifts online. We are really missing seeing our customers face to face and being out chatting to them out on the stall and can’t wait to be back when it’s safe to reopen again!”
Find out more at www.stavesart.com or www.instagram.com/stavesart and check out the Visit York e-shop for a selection of unique gifts, merchandise and clothing from a range of local suppliers and artists.
