Walled Up?

Worker sent to remove graffiti finds image of himself on the same wall hours later

When a worker was called in to paint over some unwanted graffiti, he no doubt thought it was just another routine clear up job.

Little did he know that the artist was secretly photographing him to include him in his next artwork.
The stencil artist – who is known only as 'DS' – painted his first piece of 'Bad Kitty' graffiti on a wall in London in May in a piece intended to be a comment on the "squeaky clean image" of the Hello Kitty cartoon.
However, DS, 28, from London, was surprised to find the graffiti being removed just eight hours after he'd finished the work.
Wanting to document the removal, he decided to photograph the worker and use his image as inspiration for a new piece of work on the same wall.
A month later, the piece is still on the wall in Essex Road, Islington.
DS told the Daily Mail: "My reaction to it being removed was a little different than normally. Knowing a piece as been removed or painted over doesn’t bother me, it’s the name of the game in graffiti but this time was a little different as it only lasted eight hours.
"So you can imagine my frustration when coming back I found the council (or private company I’m not sure) starting the process of erasing it from the wall – which I documented.
"Looking through the images I took I saw a great one of the removals man so I wanted to put him up in the same space."
The Londoner said it should not be for the council to decide on the "legitimacy" or "worthiness" of a piece.
He said it would be better to let graffiti "run it’s natural course even if that means great art being painted over – another one will takes its place".
He said it was a strange time for street art at the moment when "Banksy does a piece and it gets protected by the council" but "another piece from a just as edgy artist ... gets taken down".