Earlier this month, a string of graffiti artworks popped up around British seaside towns, bearing all of the usual Banksy hallmarks: his signature stencilled style, playful interaction with the surrounding environment, and in one case a sunbathing rat (because even his fave Tube-dwelling vermin needs a summer holiday).
Since then, fans of the elusive street artist have been monitoring Instagram — his preferred method of authentication — for proof that the artworks are the real deal.
Sure enough, Banksy confirmed that he was behind the artworks last night (August 13), posting a video titled: A Great British Spraycation. In the three-minute clip, he drives around in a campervan, touring the locations where his artworks appeared, including Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Gorleston, Oulton Broad, and Cromer.
At each stop, the street artist mingles with crowds of holidaymakers, or sneaks out in the dead of night — always anonymous, obviously, in a grey hoodie — to create murals with paint cans hidden in a picnic cooler.
The varied artworks depict everything from a giant seagull pecking massive, makeshift chips out of a skip, to a crowd of people dancing on the top of a bus stop, and a kid digging up the street to make a sandcastle.
Others include a hermit crab standing by a stack of empty shells, holding a sign that reads “Luxury rentals only”, and a statue playfully modified with half a traffic cone to look like it’s licking an ice cream.
Unusually, Banksy also signed one of the works: a graffiti tag on a tiny thatched stable at Merrivale Model Village. Despite the model village’s enthusiasm when they discovered the artwork, they have since had to keep the Banksy artwork “secured off site” due to over-enthusiastic crowds (which have pretty much become par for the course when it comes to Banksy’s public artworks).
Banksy previously shared another behind-the-scenes video in March this year, which showed him working on a painting at Reading Gaol, the site of Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment. Find his new film, A Great British Spraycation, below, and take a closer look at the artworks in the gallery above.
