London is lucky (or unlucky) enough, depending on your point of view, to have a some of his finest work, scattered around the Capital on walls, doors and pavements, all in the most unlikely of places. In my opinion Banksy shows us that real artists can do more than just splash colour around, they can paint and draw. If you look at the early work of artists such as Picasso and Braque you will see that a very long time before Picasso was drawing ears on chairs; or Braque was dripping paint on canvas like a sloppy plasterer they were both creating exquisite, representational works. Many graffiti "artists" daub and often they don't do that very well but Banksy and artists like him enliven and enrich our often bleak urban landscape. They give us something to laugh at or think about and they do it in a way that is real, relevant and entertaining and they give it to us for free.
Banksy has been responsible for such work in places as far apart as Palestine and the United States. In 2006 he left a life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay detainee at the California theme park Disneyland and in 2005, he decorated Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side.
On the 1st May of this year a man and a woman were caught on CCTV camera in a smash and grab of two signed prints of Banksy's work valued at £16000. This is not the first time that Banksys work has been stolen and there have been incidents where the art has been literally chiseled off walls.
However, In 2007 workers from Network Rail painted over a set of doors to an electricity generator on which the artist had sprayed a monkey preparing to blow up a bunch of bananas. Network Rail said at the time
"We don't want graffiti on our property and we will remove it.....It's ugly, illegal and the public don't like it."
I bet the magnolia paint they used to cover it looks lovely and presumably was a nice clean canvas for all those charming, black tags that you see everywhere. Interestingly only a week earlier six pieces by Banksy fetched £372,000 at auction. A work in sprayed paint on canvas, depicting old women playing lawn bowls with bombs, went for £102,000.
Transport for London have also been responsible for a similar act of criminal damage. In 2007 they painted over an image depicting a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns. The image was valued at more than £300,000.
In April of this year street cleaners in Melbourne Australia painted over a Banksy stencil of a rat hanging underneath a parachute and adorning the wall of an old council building. In September 2009 a mural by Banksy which once featured on the cover of a single by rock band Blur, was painted over by Hackney Council. The building's owner was in tears as she begged workmen to stop. By the time she persuaded them to it was almost gone. Hackney Council said the image was painted over in error. The property owner and resident gave consent for the mural to be painted on her building so it could be photographed for the launch of Blur's 2003 single Crazy Beat. The Council didn't have her permission to remove it and although it wrote to her requesting permission it wrote to an address she had not lived at for 25 years. Getting no response to its letter the Council served an enforcement notice. Hackney Council was unrepentant!
In September 2008 Banksy gave us the Winged Angel with Bullet-Proof Vest and Skull in the space where the Pulp Fiction image had been painted over by Transport for London. Sadly there is now a black space where Banksy's Winged Angel used to be in Old Street, London.
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