I have blogged about the elusive street artist Banksy a number of times — for example, here. There is always some curious new story about him, or about this or that artist who may or may not have been him. He’s like Macavity, T.S. Eliot’s mystery cat, who’s “called the hidden paw.”
Now, according to the Huffington Post and the Independent in England, he has done a kindness for someone living in an oil tank that got too famous after Banksy painted it.
“In 2011, while in Los Angeles promoting his documentary ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop,’ the shadowy British street artist Banksy tagged a vaguely elephantine water tank near the Pacific Coast Highway with the sentence ‘This Looks a Bit Like an Elephant.’ Unbeknown to him, the abandoned tank had been serving as a makeshift home for Tachowa Covington. …
” ‘I looked out of the hatch, and there were two guys there,’ he told the Independent. ‘ ” They were writing on his home.
“Less than two weeks later, after buying the tank directly from the city of Los Angeles, the owners of the design firm Mint Currency had it removed by crane and trucked away, leaving Covington just 16 hours to gather his possessions and vacate his home of seven years. That’s when Banksy stepped in to help the man he’d inadvertently left homeless, giving him enough money to find an apartment and pay his bills for a full year.
” ‘He helped me so fast, I didn’t have to spend a single day more on the streets. It was like a miracle,’ Covington said. ‘There ain’t no better man than Banksy … He was an angel to me. He helped me more than anybody helped me in my life.’ ”
Photo from Capturing Banksy
Banksy Gave a Man Whose Home He Tagged Enough Money To Live for a Year
In 2011, while in Los Angeles promoting his documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” the shadowy British street artist Banksy tagged a vaguely elephantine water tank near the Pacific Coast Highway with the sentence “This Looks a Bit Like an Elephant.” Unbeknown to him, the abandoned tank had been serving as a makeshift home for Tachowa Covington, and the attention brought by the famous artist’s stencil forced him to abandon his home of seven years.
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