Robert "Banksy" Banks is a well-known pseudo-anonymous[1] English graffiti artist. He is believed to be a native of Yate, Greater Bristol and born in 1974, but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and personal and biographical details. According to Tristan Manco, Banksy "was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier engineer, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s."His artworks are often-satirical pieces of art that encompass topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti with a distinctive stencilling technique copied from the 1980's Parisian urban art terrorist Blek le Rat, has appeared in cities around the world.
Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist in the late 1980s as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), often assisting writers Kato and Tes. In 1998 he arranged the enormous "Walls On Fire" graffiti jam along with fellow Bristol graffiti legend Inkie on the site of the future "@t Bristol" development. The weekend-long event drew artists from all over the UK and Ohio, and his organisation of the event established his name within the European graffiti scene. By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realising how much less time it took to complete a "piece." He claims he changed to stencilling whilst he was hiding from the police under a train carriage, and soon became more widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London.
Banksy's stencils feature striking and humorous images occasionally combined with slogans. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, or pro-freedom. Subjects include animals such as monkeys and rats, policemen, soldiers, children, and the elderly.
In late 2001, on a trip to Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, he met up with the Gen-X pastellist, visual activist, and recluse James DeWeaver in Byron Bay, where he stenciled a parachuting rat with clothes pin on nose above a toilet at the Arts Factory Lodge. The stencil is still there, seven years later, at last reports.
He also makes stickers (the Neighbourhood Watch subvert) and sculpture (the murdered phonebox), and was responsible for the cover art of Blur's 2003 album Think Tank. Banksy's real name may be Robert Banks. Banksy's year of birth has been given as 1974. Simon Hattenstone from Guardian Unlimited is one of the very few people to have interviewed him face-to-face. Hattenstone describes him as "a cross of Jimmy Nail and British rapper Mike Skinner" and "a 28 year old male who showed up wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a silver tooth, silver chain, and one silver earring".
The registrant of Banksy's website is Steve Lazarides, a photographer. Lazarides is Banksy's agent. Lazarides now has a gallery on Greek Street in London's Soho called Laz Inc, where Banksy originals can be bought.
Biographical information from Wikipedia