Tag You're It

A blog tag is where you "tag" other people and give them something to write about and then they have to do it. I think that is a good way to keep everyone interested in the blog and help us learn new things about each other.

So here it goes. I tag Mom, Jenny, Eric and Troy to (1) tell us about a living person they admire (2) why they admire them and (3) what we can learn about you from your choice. Those poeple HAVE to do a post. But anyone else who wants to join in can do one too. Because I started the tag I'll go first.

(1) A Living Person I Admire

The person I chose has no known name and there exits only a couple of grainy photos of him that never show his face. No, he's not a Middle Eastern terrorist nicknamed "The Jackal." He's simply known as Banksy.

What we know about him is he's a very secretive artist from England. He has to be secretive because his art is technically illegal. A story from a "confidential source" says that when he was a teenager he went tagging walls with graffiti with his friends. He was slower than them and so they had moved on while he was still working on his tag when he heard police coming. He hid under a railway car for over an hour while the police milled around. While there he noticed a stenciled on number on the car--and he had a epiphany.

Over the next few years very cool and often politically-minded stencilled on grafitti began showing up all over London. At first peolple were mad about the property damage. But over time the works became more and more popular. Today you can take a "Bansky" tour of London that leads you to his paintings all over the City. I read that one of his first and most popular pieces of graffiti was itself a recent victim of vandalism. They caught the guy and he was charged with and sentenced to a heafty jail term because everyone was so mad he'd defaced this piece of "art." I wonder what Bansky would think about someone getting in trouble for putting grafitti on his grafitti?

He's now travelled all over the world and so you might see one of his distincitve pieces of vandalism near you. Some of my favorite pieces are from the Middle East where he did a lot of paintings on a big wall that seperates the Israelis from the Palistinians. His work often has a strong peace theme but not in a preachy sort of way. Instead they're just quirky images that make you suddenly stop and say to yourself, "Yeah, why can't we all just get a long?"

But painting on walls isn't all he does. One day a farmer woke up to found a stencilled message on one of his cows that said "To Advertise Here Call Banksy." He painted an elephant pink once.

He also gets old paintings of landscapes or portraits and painting new things onto them. A few years ago he was in New York and went to four different art museums with one of his own paintings under his trench coat and surreptitiously hung his paintings in each. The great thing is that it tooks weeks for the museums to figure out the woman wearing a gas mask didn't belong next to that Rembrandt.

Nike and others have tried to hire him to do big marketing campaigns for him but he's always turned them down; staying true to his anti-establishment principles. But that hasn't stopped the likes of Prince Henry and Angelina and Brad adding his stencilled paintings to his art collection.

(2) Why Admire Bansky

I admire Bansky because I don't know his name. He's like an artist superhero with a secret identity. I admire Bansky because he sees things different than anyone else. I admire Banksy because he has a sense of humor. He once stencilled "what are you looking at?" on the wall opposite a security camera. I admire him because he's a rebel. He is always poking fun at us and our society and our governments and our wars. I admire him even more because he's a peaceful rebel. Yes, he's vandalizing, but he's not hurting anyone. Instead he's painting a picture of a tank with flowers coming out of the muzzle or SWAT teams with smiley faces painted on their helmets. I admire Bansky because he hasn't sold out. I admire Bansky because he's very talented. And not just that he can come up with good ideas, he's a very talented draftsman. I admire Bansky because he's having fun.

(3) What This Tells You About Me.

Of course I want to be Bansky. You all know that I have become obsessed with art and painting. I wish that I had something as unique to say as he does. And as unique a way of saying it. I like him because he flaunts societies rules. I believe that rules are maleable and not sancrosanct. I am frustrated by people that blindly obey rules just because that is what the rule is; even in situtations where the rule obviously doesn't make sense. I wish I had the courage to paint on someone else's wall. Most of all, I wish I had more fun. So much of my day is spent worrying about problems and things that really aren't that important. I wish I could just go paint smiley faces on someone's helmet.