Meet Hanksy, the viral graffiti artist turning heads with his paintings of Donald Trump and Miley Cyrus

"I always wanted to be a Disney cartoonist," Hanksy, the 30-something anonymous street artist, tells us.

It's ironic, then, that he has made his name by turning cultural icons into bitingly funny (and often crude) memes, bringing out the darker side of the images we devour every day. In New York City, for example, he recently painted an image of the iPhone's poop emoji emblazoned with Donald Trump's face. He called it "Dump Trump".

Hanksy, who hails from the Midwest but has lived and worked in Manhattan's Lower East Side and Chinatown for the last five years, is an enigma. Or at least, as he openly admits, being enigmatic is his "shtick." Uncannily adept at distilling pop culture conversations into digestible visual puns, he's made some of the most iconic street art works in the last five years. And it all started out as, more or less, a joke. 

Let's take a look at some of his work.

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"I've always been fan of low-brow humor, wordplay, and the easy chuckle — the easy lol, that's what I like," he said. Here, the Simpsons character Mr. Burns makes for a basic pun.

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"Whatever makes me laugh, that's what I want to do," he said. "If it didn't make me roll my eyes in disgust/laughter, I wouldn't do it."

The name "Hanksy" itself is a mash-up, just like his first piece of street art. It's a riff on the work of infamous artist Banksy, known for his politically incisive work and complete anonymity.

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The story goes that back in 2011, soon after moving to New York City, Hanksy was working on a freelance writing assignment when the pun came to mind. He thought an image of Hanks' face in the Banksy style might be even wittier. No matter that he hadn't taken an art class since high school, or done any real street art before.

"I'm not a trained artist," Hanksy said.

Someone snapped a photo of it and sent it to a popular street art blog, and the rest, as they say, is history.

A former digital marketer, one of his main gimmicks is putting famous faces on other things — sometimes animals, sometimes inanimate objects.

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