BANKSY HEARTS BLEK LA RAT

Banksy is a London, England-based artist. He makes public art. His work is almost always political, or at the very least it comments on societal norms, and it more often than not achieves genuine wit.

Banksy is famous. New works of his are regularly covered by London newspapers. There is wide speculation as to his identity. If a Banksy appears on the side of a building it usually stays there. In some cases the owners of the buildings have repainted around the art... A far cry from how standard graffiti is treated, wouldn't you say?

Here is a selection of my favorite of Banksy's works...

Banksy's style is derivative of a guy named Blek la Rat, a French artist -and the inventor of stencil graffiti- who visited New York in the early 1980's and loved the traditional graf he saw there. He decided to use stencils so as to not just copy what he'd seen while in the States. Blek la Rat's stuff was also often political or satirical, and sometimes he even appeared in his work himself.

You can see Blek la Rat's work HERE.

THE ALIENS, THEY THINK THE FARMING IS PURTY

It looks like some kind of fancy -and awesome- geometric painting, but it's not... In fact, it's a photo of Kansas farmland taken from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). It's a real photo.

The photo was taken on June 24th of 2001, but was classified until 2005. The green circles -which measure as much as 1.6 km in diameter- are corn, leafy in June, and the paler green is sorghum; the bright gold color is wheat. The circular shape of the field is owed to a method of irrigation that draws water from a well at the centre of each field, using long pipes mounted on wheels that rotate on a pivot, dropping water onto the crops instead of spraying it over them with sprinklers, and necessitating round fields.

Agriculture is hot.

Click HERE to see more pics from ASTER.