“Your mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity.”
-Banksy
Career
Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist in 1990–1994 as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), with two other artists known as Kato and Tes. He was inspired by local artists and his work was part of the larger Bristol underground scene with Nick Walker, Inkie and 3D. During this time he met Bristol photographer Steve Lazarides, who began selling Banksy's work, later becoming his agent.
By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realising how much less time it took to complete a work; he soon became more widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London. Banksy's first known large wall mural was The Mild Mild West, which was painted in 1997 to cover advertising of a former solicitors' office on Stokes Croft in Bristol. The mural depicts a teddy bear lobbing a Molotov cocktail at three riot police.
Banksy's iconic stencils feature striking and humorous images occasionally combined with slogans; the messages are usually anti-war, anti-capitalist, or anti-establishment. Subjects often include rats, apes, policemen, soldiers, children, and the elderly.