Banksy Tree Finsbury Park

Banksy Watch: 08Apr24

Graffiti is really an ephemeral art, and it's Banksy's works which are the anomaly, in that they get preserved. Around where I live there are a couple of places where graffiti artist work, especially a tunnel along the Parkland Walk. Apart from all the toxic fumes, it's really amazing to see the work, which of course, it gets painted over, sprayed over, even sometimes scribbled on. I don't know what the inside etiquette of that is, but graffiti comes and goes.

Behind the boards and screens, you can see that the plaster on the wall is already beginning to fall off. I'm sure that happened after the screen was put there, and so it is rapid weathering of a base which was never intended to last. You can also see the tree budding, and even stubby blossom, making this all a very living piece.

Banksy Watch: 27Mar24

What the actual ^%$JK^)$£"£_$%^%$+????!!!!

Not my words. I quote from the person next to me visiting the Banksy Tree. I can only agree with the eloquence of that.

Well, it was born in the wild, and this is its jungle. If Banksy had painted his tree background on the wall outside Tate Modern, I guess it would be a different story. As it is, this is what you get.

Banksy Watch: 25Mar24

I went the long way home, and can't believe I was there just at the right time when the perspex cover was being installed.

I really don't understand why some big art institution like Tate Modern or the National Gallery, or one of the museum, galleries or art installation companies didn't offer a team and experts to Islington Council. Perhaps they did and Islington declined.

Instead we got some guys. Nothing against them, they're doing a days work. But really, what a mess. It's all a bit Laurel and Hardy, if not Chuckle Brothers. It's hilarious and uncomfortable to watch such a Health and Safety void.

People are already coming from all over the world to see this tree. I spoke to a woman from Japan who is in the UK for five days, and now going to use her time visiting other Banksy's. There was an extremely tall European family, and a few others all witnessing this amateurish conservation. Surely this could be done better.

Banksy Watch: 24Mar24

I live near enough to the Banksy Tree to swing by there every so often. It's been a week, and I've been 4 times.

Initially it was a statement of beautification/ meaning/ commentary/ /intervention/ graffiti - insert your own view here. It was an exciting neighbourly event. I find it powerful and eloquent. How soon it has become messy and uglified. I wonder if Banksy himself has been amongst the crowds come to visit. He must know what will happen, but there doesn't seem to be a Banksy back-up team to orchestrate the aftermath. You could almost pity the folk at Islington Council who now have this to deal with.

I've never been to see the Mona Lisa. You may well have, and I hear it's so protected by layers of distorting safety glass and so popular that you sort of shuffle past, unable to really see anything other than its vague presence. The Banksy Tree is becoming layered, you could say encrusted, with layers of safety fencing, warning signs, and now, big wooden struts. I didn't go today, but I imagine that was for some perspex covering which the Council have commissioned as a matter of urgency.

It's a bit disappointing. The Tree will not degrade naturally, nor fade into the urban landscape. It remains vulnerable.

Banksy Tree Update: 2 days later Wednesday 20Mar24

We all know it was only a matter of time before something was going to happen to this. Splattering paint over, or some graffiti was the obvious, and so it is. White paint anyway, so at least not multi-coloured.

This morning I took a bus in London, As any city ride tends to, it went through impressive areas and crappy areas. As I was sitting and thinking, my attention was caught by a little tree in a corner, and the Banksy tree immediately came to mind, and elevated that little tree. All the trees misplaced, misplanted, built around, transformed by a context of imagined paint. Just how many metaphors can you read into that?

It reminded me of something my daughter and a friend of hers used to do - swap photos of mattresses found dumped in the street. It totally transformed something appalling and imposed into not just a game, but a reframing. How often the mattresses were comically slumped, their shoulders shrugged in drunken nonchalance.

It makes the imaginary city better. I think that may well be geopsychology. And the little tree made me realise that I've already let that Banksy into my heart, into the way I see the world and the city. I carefully curate this, as I'm sure we all do.

The other day there was a buzz, and a neighbourly vibe. Already it's different there, with an ugly fence around it. What else can they do?

Monday 18Mar24

Just 10 minutes from my home, in a particularly undistinguished stretch, is a very ordinary street, Hornsey Road. Rumours of a Banksy appearing there brought us for a walk this morning. 

Britain is full of odd little patches of lawn between blocks of council estates and roads. Hornsey Road is main enough to have constant traffic and buses trundling by. On the other side of the road the housing block is slap bang up to the pavement, too near. I've always felt sorry about that, and that I'd find it difficult to live somewhere where traffic and fumes are only a pavement away.

I was particularly struck by the gift of this artwork to such an area as this, truly a little forgotten corner, as if elevating the beauty and potential of all such hidden little corners.

The tree piece is so many things - pollarded branches frame the enormous splatter of green paint on the wall of the Victorian terrace of shops with flats above - just another familiar architectural feature of London after the bombing in World War II. My own home is like that, the abruptly ended terrace where decades ago a bomb fell, the site long filled in with a '50s council block.

So it's an odd little space. And the cropped tree, just undistinguished city furniture, now elevated to it's true significance, and probably international stardom.

The scale, the ambition of the green splatter is wonderful. It's the most perfect site-specific concept. It makes the tree sculptural, and it gives form and meaning to the paint.

Today the patch of pavement was filled with reporters and photographers. There were locals and visitors. What I particularly loved was that it brought out some local arty people, keen to talk, and delighted that for once something like this is on their doorstep. The neighbours of the tree, the people living in these unlikely flats, are being interviewed. The tree belongs to them, and to everyone.

The tree is commentary, it's an intervention, it's bold, beautiful, stunning, unmistakable. It's a happening.