10 Amazing Facts About Banksy

Banksy, the Scarlet Pimpernel of the art world, has turned the art market upside down. Will Ellsworth-Jones reveals 10 things about him 

© Patricia Spinelli/Alamy Stock Photo 

1. Banksy didn’t go to art school but attended the then fee-paying Bristol Cathedral School. He got an E in GCSE art before going on to a sixth form college, where he studied art. After that he learned his trade on the streets.

2. He first painted under the name Robin Banx. As he experimented with styles of painting this evolved into Banksy, which had less of the gangster ‘robbing banks’ ring to it and was more memorable and easier to write.

3. The artist started painting and met other graffiti artists at Barton Hill Youth Club in Bristol, where the hope was that, by painting at the club, they would be discouraged from doing so in the city. It did not have the desired effect. Banksy’s first show, with other artists, was in a laundromat near the youth club.

4. Banksy is called a graffiti artist but he discovered stencils early on. He told a friend: ‘As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. The ruthlessness and the efficiency of it is perfect.’

© Alamy stock photo/ Dan De Keniend

5. Pure graffiti artists see anyone using stencils as a sell-out, abandoning their complicated hieroglyphic world. A ‘war’ between Banksy and London artist Robbo saw them painting over each other’s work. Robbo died in 2011, but his followers still paint over Banksy’s work when they can.

6. Blek le Rat, a French stencil artist, was one of Banksy’s earliest influences. Like Banksy he enjoyed painting rats, and his style can be seen in much of Banksy’s early work.

7. In the early days live animals were a key part of Banksy’s exhibitions. There were pigs sprayed in (non-toxic) blue and white, and a sheep and a cow in one show. Some 164 rats ran around another gallery and a painted elephant featured in his 2006 Los Angeles exhibition, denoting messages on poverty and the fact that 1.7 billion people in the world had no access to water (‘there’s an elephant in the room...’).

8. Banksy’s major projects have included setting up The Walled Off Hotel next to the Israeli wall in Bethlehem, and turning an old lido in Weston-super-Mare into a massive art show, Dismaland. He is also a film-maker; his film Exit Through the Gift Shop is a documentary about Banksy creating a successful street artist, Mr Brainwash, who is nominated for an Academy Award.

9. In 2018, when his painting Girl with Balloon half shredded as the hammer came down on it at £1m at Sotheby’s, Banksy implied that the shredding mechanism had failed. It is now considered more likely that the shredder stopped exactly where he planned, leaving enough painting to be sold again, this time for £18m, in October 2021.

10. Banksy has only been caught once, in New York in the late 1990s, when he was arrested while spraying a billboard on the roof of an apartment building. He spent 40 hours in a cell and was given community service and a fine. Today police would ask for his autograph.

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Banksy: the man behind the wall by Will Ellsworth-Jones, published by Frances Lincoln

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This feature first appeared in the Spring 2022 edition of The Arts Society Magazine, available exclusively to Members and Supporters