A large cat by Banksy appeared ready to pounce on a bare wooden billboard on Edgware Road in Cricklewood, northwest London, on Saturday.
The anonymous artist Banksy, who confirmed the publication of the picture on Saturday afternoon, is now promising even more summer fun.
A seventh image may soon appear in another surprising place, the observer has learned. London residents should keep their eyes open for a few more days, a spokesman advised.
For a week now, the streets of the capital have been populated by a series of unusual animal sightings thanks to Banksy, including pelicans, a goat and a trio of monkeys.
The street artist’s vision is simple: his latest graffiti series is intended to cheer up the public at a time when many headlines are grim and light is often harder to see than shadows.
To be revealed this weekend, Banksy hopes the uplifting works will cheer people up with a moment of unexpected levity, while gently underlining the human capacity for creative play rather than destruction and negativity. Some of the recent theories about the deeper meaning of each new image are far too complicated, Banksy’s support organisation, the Pest Control Office, has suggested.
When a goat balancing on a precipice first appeared near Kew Bridge in Richmond, south-west London, on Monday, some thought the goat might be a symbol of humanity’s folly. Others speculated that this striking stencil could be a visual pun on the idea of the goat, which has now become popularly known as “Greatest of All Time.”
On Tuesday, two elephant heads appeared in silhouette, trunks reaching out through the bricked-up windows of a Chelsea house. Next came perhaps the most joyful image yet, when a trio of monkeys appeared on Wednesday, swinging across a bridge over Brick Lane in east London.
On Thursday, the fourth day of Banksy’s visual campaign, the silhouette of a howling lone wolf painted on a large satellite dish on a roof in Peckham was quickly removed by two masked men with a ladder and made off with their loot. Yesterday, Banksy’s representative said the theft had nothing to do with them, adding: “We have no knowledge of the current whereabouts of the dish.”
For many Londoners, Friday means fish and chips – and Banksy felt the same way. So hungry pelicans appeared above a fish and chip shop in Walthamstow on the corner of Pretoria Street, snapping at fish with their long beaks.
Banksy, whose closely guarded identity has never been confirmed, works under the cover of night with a small team of helpers and is said to have been spotted at work on occasion. At 5am on Monday, two men in a cherry picker were filmed next to Kew Bridge as a bearded man in a van operated a hydraulic lift carrying someone wearing a large white face mask.
after newsletter campaign
As Banksy’s new menagerie pops up all over the city, the rescue boat funded by the artist is working to help vulnerable asylum seekers reach safety. The MV Louise Michel is an independent high-speed rescue boat that patrols the refugee routes in the Mediterranean and has picked up at least 85 survivors in recent days and brought them safely to Pozzallo, Sicily. On Saturday, it was also actively on call to search for a boat in distress. Five years ago, Banksy announced he would fund the vessel, named after a French feminist anarchist, with the intention of rescuing refugees in distress fleeing North Africa.
In June, a Banksy-designed dinghy for migrants was used for crowd surfing at Glastonbury during performances by Bristol indie-punk band Idles and rapper Little Simz. The then Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said the artist was “trivialising” small boat crossings and was “disgusting”. Banksy responded at the time that the detention of the Louise Michel by Italian authorities at the time was a truly “disgusting and unacceptable” development.
His latest graffiti animals, however, are deliberately lighthearted, like Banksy’s 2020 lockdown series “The Great British Spraycation.” Chips were also memorable in Banksy’s coastal series, with the image of a seagull hovering over oversized “chips” in a container. He also created a rat relaxing in a deckchair with a cocktail.
Another image from the lockdown campaign referred to the refugee crisis. It shows three children sitting in a rickety boat made of scrap metal. Banksy had written above it: “We are all in the same boat.”
The origins of this series were confirmed by the release of a three-minute Instagram video clip revealing the hidden figure of the artist travelling in a battered camper van on a holiday tour that included Lowestoft in Suffolk and Gorleston, Great Yarmouth, Cromer and King’s Lynn, all in Norfolk. His final London destinations are not yet known.
