It's been a long-held tradition that when two heads of state meet for the first time, they exchange official gifts from their home countries. So when President Barack Obama traveled to England late last month to meet with David Cameron, Britain's newly elected Prime Minister, it was expected that each man would come bearing gifts.

But what absolutely nobody expected from the meeting between the two world leaders was that it would suddenly catapult an unknown graffiti artist from London's East End into the glare and spotlight of the mainstream media and, ultimately, into the art history books.

When Prime Minister Cameron gave President Obama a painting called Twenty First Century City (pictured at right), few people outside of the graffiti and urban art world had ever heard of the artist, Ben Eine. Literally overnight, Eine went from being a relatively unknown artist to being featured on the covers of hundreds of newspapers, websites, and magazines around the world.

Before finding himself in the global spotlight, Eine was well known to us, primarily for his work on the street. Eine first caught people's attention, including ours, for the large iconic alphabet letters he would paint onto the shop grates near London's Brick Lane. For his entire career, Eine has been the personification of the underground graffiti artist who has shunned public attention to allow his artwork to speak for itself. The story goes that it was Samantha Cameron, the PM's wife (and apparently a closet fan of Eine's), who first recommended the artist to her husband.

Every so often a single event in an artist's life will forever change the course of his or her career, but perhaps nothing could have foretold what happened last month to Ben Eine. And yet for those who have known of Ben for as long as we have, none of his overnight success comes as much of a surprise--for years he's been one of the most dedicated and skilled artists to be found not only in England but anywhere in the world.

We're thrilled to not only congratulate Ben Eine for his well deserved success, but to also call him Character Approved.

[Images: Ben Eine]