street art – Pain In The Bud

Fearless Cat Forces Bear To Retreat, PLUS: Flow’s Void Sparks Interest In Black Moggies

Flow’s Cat has improved things for his fellow voids, who are drawing more interest from adopters.

This video is bonkers!

A cat who is definitely not Buddy stared down a bear and made the ursine interloper retreat in fear in a confrontation caught on camera.

The stand-off happened in Pike County, Pa., and the cat’s name is T’Challa, after the titular hero of Marvel’s Black Panther franchise.

“I think perhaps this young bear woke this kitty cat up because he was not happy that he was sharing his deck with him when he woke up and he expressed himself,” said the homeowner whose security cameras caught the exchange.

After T’Challa made a series of feints, the bear — who is orders of magnitude larger — beat a hasty (for a bear) retreat.

Well done, T’Challa! Someone get that good boy a treat!

Go with the Flow

Part of what makes Flow so spectacular — aside from the breathtaking visuals, clever narrative and the strange world it portrays — is how endearing its star, Cat, is.

The little guy shows enormous resilience as he survives a biblical flood, gets chased by a flock of angry secretary birds, learns to swim, and finds his confidence in situations that would terrify any feline. He’s incredibly expressive, revealing his emotions with every twitch of his tail and whiskers, as well as his distinctive meow and, most of all, his bright yellow eyes.

He’s also the first feline star to win an Oscar and a Golden Globe, as well as many other film awards for the universally praised film.

Now he’s got another accomplishment to his name: he’s improved the way people view black cats, who have long been the victims of absurd human superstition and have a hard time finding forever homes because of the stigma.

Animal welfare organizations are reporting heightened interest in black cats (good), but not a manic rush to adopt them as has happened when other species and breeds are popularized in films. (Bad, because those pets are often discarded when the novelty wears off.)

In other words, Cat may have inspired something close to parity in adoptions in some places.

Cat is beloved in director Gints Zilbalodis’ home country of Lithuania. The capital, Riga, is now adorned with street art of the little guy, including a statue sitting atop a major monument in the heart of the city.

Latest Banksy Is A Cat In London

The artist says his whimsical animal images are meant to help lower the national temperature after a week of riots and incrimination following the stabbing deaths of three young girls.

UK street artist Banksy has been busy lately, with a new piece of graffiti popping up in London every day for the past six days.

All six new images are animals and the latest is a cat. Sprayed on a billboard in northwest London, the Banksy feline is a black silhouette of a stretching cat and was found this morning.

On Friday, the anonymous artist added a pair of pelicans to a fish shop sign, making it look like the pelicans were eating the fish. That follows a trio of monkeys who appear to be swinging across a bridge, a pair of elephants, a mountain goat, and a howling wolf in the center of a satellite dish, creating the impression that the dish is the moon silhouetting the wolf.

Banksy pelicans — The whimsical animal renderings often show their subjects appearing to interact with their urban environment.

Banksy’s art commands high prices at auction: one piece sold for $25 million, while many others have fetched winning bids well into seven and eight figures.

The wolf piece lasted only hours before a group of men came along and took it. A representative for the artist confirmed to the BBC that the artwork was stolen.

Likewise, the feline was gone by afternoon, removed by contractors who said they were trying to safeguard it.

This isn’t Banksy’s first cat. In 2015 the anonymous artist snuck into the Gaza strip via a tunnel from Egypt and painted a kitten on a fragment of concrete wall that was rubble left over from an Israeli strike. Banksy has also been responsible for at least three other feline-themed pieces of street art, and possibly more.

Banksy Gaza kitten — Banksy’s kitten graffiti in the Gaza strip.

The UK artist is known for using his art to highlight causes, and has made reference to various conflicts around the world, unregulated capitalism, destruction of the environment and distrust of authority, with many of his pieces taking aim at the UK surveillance state. As The Londonist wrote, London is considered one of the most surveilled cities in the world, with between 627,000 and 942,000 CCTV cameras monitoring the public.

However, Banksy’s latest series eschews a political message, his reps told UK media. After a tumultuous week that saw rioting across the country in response to the stabbing deaths of three young girls — and inaccurate news reports about the identity of the attacker — Banksy, his publicist said, merely wants his countrymen to “cheer up.”