Free Banksy by Will Ellsworth-Jones

writers will never see Banksy
as one of them. At this point in his career you may imagine he no longer cares very much about what they think, but he very obviously does. At the end of December 2011 he put up on his website a
slideshow of the whole Robbo affair, starting with the original piece, next showing how it had been partially defaced by others and then illustrating the tit for tat between the pair of them. The
final picture was a black and white replica done by Banksy of the original piece, with the addition of a candle in the shape of a spray can spreading light amidst the dark; it seems to be some sort
of homage to Robbo, lying in hospital in a coma. To emphasise the point he added elsewhere on his site: ‘I would never deliberately cuss Robbo – he’s a graffiti legend.’

Four
    Finding His Own Style
    T here are a range of explanations that Banksy has given of his reasons for switching to stencils. The most romantic story comes in his book Wall
and Piece , where he tells of the time when, aged eighteen, he was in the middle of painting a train with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up. Everyone ran, but Banksy
got ‘ripped to shreds’ by thorny bushes as he tried to make his escape. ‘The rest of my mates made it to the car and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper
truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there listening to the cops on the tracks I realised I had to cut my painting time in half or give up altogether. I was staring straight up at
the stencilled plate on the bottom of a fuel tank when I realised I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high.’
    It certainly makes a good story, but in 2002 he told the Observer he abandoned graffiti because ‘I was 21 and crap.’ Stencils, on the other hand, were ‘quick, clean,
crisp and efficient. And that’s quite sexy.’ A couple of years later he told Wired magazine, ‘I wasn’t good at freehand graffiti, I was too slow,’ and a year
after that he told Simon Hattenstone of the Guardian , in the only face-to-faceinterview with a newspaper he has ever given, ‘Because I was quite crap with a
spray can, I started cutting out stencils instead.’
    But perhaps it is all rather simpler than that, for he was most convincing when talking to author and friend Tristan Manco: ‘I started off painting graffiti in the classic New York style
you use when you listen to too much hip hop as a kid, but I was never very good at it. As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. The ruthlessness and the efficiency of it is
perfect.
    ‘I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars. Even a picture of a
rabbit playing a piano looks hard as a stencil.’ A fellow writer from Bristol days confirms that it was more than just sitting under a dumper truck that persuaded him to abandon his attempts
at ‘traditional’ graffiti: ‘Stencils are no coincidence. He knows his history. He looked at Paris in the sixties and how quickly they got their message up.’
    Almost from the start Banksy showed an unusual single-mindedness, which he very much needed. For Bristol was a hardcore graffiti town, heavily influenced by the styles that for a few years had
overwhelmed the New York subway trains. Various artists from America – particularly Rock Steady Crew, who straddled both the music and the graffiti scene – brought their graffiti skills
with them when they were touring here; but more than anything else it was one book that was the key reference point.
    Martha Cooper was a photographer who had moved from Rhode Island to New York City, where she worked on Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post . Henry Chalfant had arrived in New York as a
sculptor, but with rather less success. Both had become disillusioned with what they were doing and had startedphotographing