Artist Research - Banksy

 

Bansky is a very famous graffiti street-artist based in Bristol, England. His birth name or date of birth is not known to the public. His work combines dark humour with politics and graffiti created using a very unique stencilling technique and his work is features on walls, bridges and streets all over the world. He started off as a butcher, however became interested in graffiti during the ‘great Bristol aerosol boom’ in the 80’s. He was inspired by an artist called 3D who later went on to be a founding member of Massive Attack, a music group. Banksy is well known for disagreeing with the idea from the government that graffiti art is vandalism and tends to display his work on extremely public surfaces.

This piece by Banksy was painted using spray paint and stencil onto a public wall. At the top, bold black lettering spells out the phrase ‘If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth’. Below this is a picture of a young girl in black and white who has crossed out the word ‘truth’ and has written ‘politics’ underneath in red. Bansky has obviously made this piece as controversial and as provocative as possible. Underneath the text and image of the young girl, white graffiti can be seen which gives the piece more depth and texture.

 

This piece shows another young girl, this time sat at the bottom of the wall. She is holding a balloon which is actually the O in the text on the image which says ‘No Future’. Again, this piece is controversial and provocative as the text is quite negative and pessimistic and people tend to want to look on the brighter side of life. Underneath the main image and lettering, chipped paint and older graffiti can be seen which gives it more depth and makes it look more old. The picture of the girl is quite obviously stencilled on and the lines are quite bold and uniform, not like it was a spontaneous painting.

 

 have chosen to look at Banksy because he paints on buildings, which links to my theme of ‘buildings with lettering’ in a more out-of-the-box way. I also like how the colours used on most of his pieces are very limited; he usually sticks to black, white and red. This could be to reflect the seriousness behind the messages in the individual pieces.