Free Banksy by Will Ellsworth-Jones Page B

tattoo parlour in Bristol. It is a painting of giant wasps (with television sets strapped to them as
additional weapons) dive-bombing a tempting bunch of flowers in a vase with their long red tongues curling towards the nectar. What somehow makes this aerosol painting work is the fact that the
flowers and their vase are encased in a wooden frame screwed to the wall, so the angry wasps are buzzing towards a traditional still life. The manager, Maryanne Kempf, says, ‘It was an
all-nighter and the next day when he came back he still wasn’t sure how to finish it off. He saw an empty frame in a skip, screwed it to the wall and it was done.’ It is a typical
Banksy touch which lifts the painting out of the ordinary. (Like many early Banksy paintings, this one ended up on eBay, but the tricky problem of how to remove it from the wall was never solved
because the bidding stopped at £6889 – below the reserve price.)
    Perhaps the best judge of this early work is Banksy himself. In his three small self-published books there is not one example of this freehand work from his Bristol days. In Wall and
Piece , which followed later, there are 316 photographs – give or take a picture or two – but amidst so many photographs only six of these early pieces are included. There is never
going to be an exhibition of Banksy’s ‘Early Work’ because most of it was soon painted over. But it was nearly always photographed before it was obliterated and these photographs
do not appear to be memories he treasures.
    Banksy was not the first to switch to stencils. 3D, Robert Del Naja, tried it in 1986 for the face of Mona Lisa – the body he did freehand – and, he says, ‘the graffiti boys
hated it.’ But 3D had been one of the earliest graffiti artists in Bristol and no one was seriously going to give him much trouble.
    Jody was another early stencil artist in the city but, without quite the same pedigree as 3D, he found life rather more difficult. In an interview with Felix Braun for Weapon of Choice magazine he says he ran into a ‘notoriously intimidating’ member of the United Bombers crew (famous in their day for tagging virtually everything that moved)
just after he had finished stencilling his version of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe on the wall at Barton Hill. ‘He stood right in my face and said: “You can fuck off with your fucking
stencilled faces, you cheating ****! Nothing you’ve done will ever test my pieces.”’ It did, he admits, put him off stencils for a bit. Banksy has never even hinted that he got
the same sort of treatment. Perhaps it was because he was not the first, but more likely it was because of the sort of character he was. ‘To us stencils were taboo,’ says Inkie.
‘I would have just been laughed at, it was all about face. Even if you used a bit of paper or some sellotape or masking tape to do the sharp edges it was frowned on . . . But Banksy had a
punk attitude. He didn’t care what people thought, he had a strong personality.’
    So it was not as though Banksy was the only person in Bristol to have thought about stencils; but he was one of the very few who dared to make the big leap. It was much more than just a change
of style; he risked banishment from the strong subculture that was part of the lure of graffiti. This is perhaps why he did not convert to stencils overnight. It was almost as if he was testing the
water, for although some of his early pieces look like stencils they are actually painted freehand to give the stencil effect. Thus in one early work on an Esso garage in Bristol, painted with
other members of the Dry Breadz Crew, most of the length of the piece is pure graffiti, but at one end the two children who we are used to seeing on the lollipop lady’s sign warning of
children crossing, have been gentlytransformed by Banksy into robbers so the girl is carrying a gun and the boy is carrying a briefcase leaking money gained in their
successful raid. It looks