I recently discussed this Banksy artwork on another site. It is of a large cat and as you can see there's a pom-pom end to the tail which indicates to me that is meant to be a lion. We know that Banksy is an activist, left-wing, concerned, and sensitive about wildlife and equality et cetera. He's quite a campaigner in a way through his artwork. This stencilled artwork was in Cricklewood which is North London, UK.
The black cat was stencilled onto an old advertising hoarding that hadn't been used for a long time by the look of it. The owners of the hoarding apparently employ contractors to remove the artwork because they feared that it would be stolen by an individual (as they often are) and that would result in the hoarding collapsing and harming somebody. That is their reason but I suspect the reason is to steal the artwork!! 😱😃
The video shows it being removed. And the public are booing as it happened because they like the artwork. It elevates the mood of the place where they live. It makes them feel good. Unfortunately, as mentioned, his artwork almost always gets stolen because it is highly valuable. And I'm talking in the hundreds of thousands of pounds sometimes or at least £10,000, something like that.
To complete the story, I created an Infographic which explains, as I understand it, how he creates is very special artwork. I am speculating in the Infographic but is quite interesting because he's been doing this for a very long time and nobody knows what he looks like. 😎
But the biggest point to make here is that he works as a team. He needs a team of individuals to use a cherry picker or scaffolding to get to high places. He does like to paint his artwork at high places, well off the ground. Perhaps he does this to protect the artwork and perhaps to make it more visible. It's quite unusual as we see in the video for his artwork to be at ground level.
He works at night and in the early days apparently he worked with a kind of hoarding around the artwork so people - I guess - thought he was a local government contractor doing some maintenance work or something like that. That helped to disguise him.
And on another occasion he was seen wearing a mask on a cherry picker so he does take remaining anonymous very seriously because it's part of his art. And I believe that the stealing of his artwork is also part of his art because it allows the common man, to participate in generating some income. It is an act of equality, a gift to Londoners if you like.
Speculating on how Banksy works by Michael Broad
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