Have a good life! Banksy’s £20k reward for schoolboy
WHEN schoolboy Ben Azarya helped a fellow train passenger pick up the art materials he had dropped, all he expected was the man’s thanks.
But the stranger was in fact the graffiti artist Banksy, who rewarded the 14-year-old with a signed print worth £20,000 and told him to ‘have a good life’.
Ben had no idea how famous Banksy was until he went home and looked him up online – and discovered his original works sell for more than £1million.
The elusive artist, who told Ben his name was Robin Banks, had been daubing different colours at the top of the print when he dropped his paints. The schoolboy immediately picked them up, prompting the artist to reach for the sheet he had been working on.
‘He started signing it in weird letters and numbers,’ Ben recalled.
‘He said, “Do you know who Robin Banks is?” I said no and he said, “This will be worth about £20,000 – have a good life, brother”.’ The print showed one of Banksy’s most famous works, Rage, Flower Thrower, which depicts a masked youth about to hurl a bunch of flowers in the style of a Molotov cocktail. It was originally painted on a wall in Jerusalem in 2003.
Ben’s mother Janine, 51, hopes to have the signature authenticated by Banksy’s agent.
Describing the artist as white and in his late 40s, Ben said: ‘He was wearing scruffy clothes and jeans with paint on. He looked really wacky.’ If the signature turns out to be genuine, he intends to sell the print, adding: ‘I will probably spend about £1,000 and get a new phone and save the rest.’
Banksy is known for acts of charity. In 2013, he set up a stall selling his art to unwitting buyers in New York’s Central Park for just £40. When it emerged that the works were his, some were valued at £70,000 at auction.
The secretive artist has only ever been photographed wearing a mask or hood. The Mail on Sunday named him as former public schoolboy Robin Gunningham in 2008.