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 Europe 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.
