Banksy

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Banksy is a well-known yet pseudo-anonymous graffiti artist, possibly named Robert Banks. It is believed that Banksy is a native of Yate near Bristol who was born in 1974, but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and basic personal and biographical details. However, 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 which encompass topics from politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti with a distinctive stenciling technique, has appeared in London and in cities around the world.

Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist in the late 1990's 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 'at 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 stenciling after realising how much less time it took to complete a 'piece '. He claims he changed to stenciling 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. He also makes stickers (the Neighbourhood Watch subvert) and sculpture (the murdered phone box) Banksy slowly started to get more and more prolific and notable after the millennium.

In August 2004, Banksy produced a quantity of spoof British £10 notes substituting Princess Diana's head for the Queen's and changing 'Bank of England' to 'Banksy of England' Someone threw a large wad of these into a crowd at Notting Hill Carnival that year which some recipients then tried to spend in local shops. These notes were also given with invitations to a picturesonwalls.com Santas Ghetto exhibition. The individual notes have since been selling on eBay for about £200 each. A Limited run of 50 signed posters containing 10 uncut notes were also produced and sold by pictures on walls for £100 each to commemorate the passing of Princess Diana. One of these sold in May 2007 on eBay for $35,000.

The subversive political messages Banksy conveys through his stencils and sculptures can be found on streets, walls and buildings across the world, from London to New York.

Last year, he left a life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay detainee at the California theme park Disneyland.

And in 2005, he decorated Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side.

He has suddenly become one of art's hottest properties, with Angelina Jolie and Christina Aguilera among those who are reported to have splashed out on his work.

A picture depicting pensioners bowling with bombs broke the £100,000 barrier - setting a new auction record for his works and placing him firmly in the artistic elite. "Space Girl and Bird" went for £288,000 pounds to an anonymous U.S. buyer.

After the auction, his web site featured a sketch of an auction room with a message on a canvas saying: "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."

But while the public may have grown to love - or loathe - Banksy's public stunts, he has managed to carve a career out of remaining anonymous.

It may be during the day in a famous gallery that an illicit painting of a bucolic scene disfigured with police incident tape, or a Warhol-type can of soup bearing the Tesco label, or a version of Monet's Water Lily Pond with a shopping trolley in its reflective waters, or the transformation of Rodin's The Thinker into The Drinker by way of a traffic cone placed on the subject's head, are surreptitiously placed among the legitimate exhibits.

This is the work of Banksy, the London-based so-called "art terrorist" whose current exhibition in Los Angeles has been making waves, in particular its centre-piece of a live elephant painted in a wallpaper design and housed in a building decorated with the same wallpaper.

His cheeky, political art, which combines graffiti with cartoons drawn with a distinctive stenciling technique, has built-up a cult following over the past few years.

"Art should have your pulse racing, your palms clammy with nerves and the excitement of creating something truly original in a dangerous environment," Banksy once said.

His real name is Robert Banks, a 32-year-old from Bristol, that cultural melting-pot of a port where graffiti art has a long heritage.

People who have met him say he has something of Dickens' The Artful Dodger about him.

He has no formal art education but learned his craft designing bootleg rock memorabilia. Before that, he'd started spraying graffiti when he was an unhappy 14-year-old schoolboy.

He was expelled from school and has reportedly served time in detention for petty crime. But, by the very nature of his covert career, the details of Banksy's life remain sketchy and few photographs of him have been made public.

He is a part of a tradition of artistic subversion reminiscent of those counter-culture posters of the late 1960's Vietnam War era, and which encompasses the graffiti artists of New York's ghettoes in the 1980s.

Political

It is art which speaks directly to the masses; humorous but often thought-provoking. His large-scale image sprayed on to a wall in North London recently, named Sweeping It Under the Carpet, was a metaphor for the West's reluctance to tackle issues like Aids in Africa.

Similarly, the elephant in the room in Los Angeles represents the failure to face the big issues that surround us. Last weekend this week, he smuggled an inflatable doll dressed as a Guantanemo Bay prisoner, into Disneyland in California, to highlight the plight of inmates there.

Last year, he took his art to the controversial Israeli security wall. Among the images he stenciled on to the Palestine side of the West Bank barrier were of children digging a hole through the wall, and of a ladder going over the top.

As a subversive artist, Banksy has eschewed the art establishment, refusing to entertain the idea of selling any of his work to a patron like Charles Saatchi whose background as a Thatcherite he detests.

Yet, Banksy consorts with many of those, like Damien Hirst, who have become establishment figures.

According to art critic and Turner Prize judge, Louisa Buck, "Banksy needs the art establishment in an inverted way, because if it didn't exist, he wouldn't have something not to care about; like a naughty boy who needs a parent to rebel against. But he's a genuine artist who lives in the real world."

Banksy's profile is increasing almost daily. His graffito depicting a woman in her underwear, her jealous husband, and her naked lover dangling from their bedroom window ledge, appeared one night on the wall of a Bristol Council Sexual Health Clinic.

It proved so popular that, after an online poll, the council decided to keep it. Banksy originals now go for tens of thousands of pounds, and books of his images sell well.

History is littered with anti-establishment figures that end up embracing the establishment they rail against, particularly as they grow in popularity.

Banksy may or may not be in this category. Certainly he will remain subversive as long as what he once described as "the thrill of painting something big where you shouldn't do" remains.

Banksy has turned down four requests to do adverts for Nike and his work is usually seen only on walls in cities across the world.

He has previously painted the Queen as a chimpanzee during her Golden Jubilee and sprayed "Mind the crap" on the steps of the Tate Britain before the Turner Prize ceremony.

He has said "the buzz" of graffiti gives him more pleasure than if all his work was in the Tate Modern with "Tony Blair and Kate moss on roller blades handing out vol au vents". "I always wanted to be a fireman, do something good for the world" - Banksy says he wants to "show that money hasn't crushed the humanity out of everything."

Banksy-british-artist-brit-artists-britart

Young British Artists or YBAs also Brit artists and Britart a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

Banksy

How to Select Matting and Framing

After selecting an image to complement your interior, the next step is to select a mat and a frame. Keep in mind that framing artwork is important not only for the aesthetic value it adds to décor, but it serves to protect your art as well.

The Frame

The frame provides the architectural as well as decorative support for a work of art. Frames can be built in all sizes and shapes and come in a variety of styles and colours to enhance your artwork.

A common error people make when choosing frames is to pick out something to match the room, not the art. You select an image that will look great in your room. Trust that a frame you select to go with an image will naturally look great with the décor and the design style of your room as well.

Make sure the width of your frame is proportionate to the size of your image. A wide frame tends to overwhelm smaller images. A thin frame would get lost around a large piece of art.

All our framing comes with standard foam backing board and dust cover, preventing dust from getting to your artwork and enhancing preservation.

The Mat

Matting is the paper or fabric border that surrounds your art within the frame. Its purpose is both decorative as well as protective.

The main purpose of the top mat is to keep the cover glass from coming into contact with the artwork. This also provides an area where air can circulate. Differences in temperature between the outside and inside of the frame can cause moisture to condense behind the glass. This moisture may damage the inks and colours and can serve as a breeding ground for mould, mildew and fungi. Placing the material directly against the glass would result in buckles, wrinkles, mould formations and "sticking" to the glass. A mat will prevent this from happening.

Mat board, as a graphic element, can serve to highlight a colour, accent a shape, or increase the overall size of the framed piece. Colour obviously plays an important role in this transformation process. It is best to select a neutral colour for the top mat. Whites and other pale earth tones give the image room to "breathe" and go well with most interiors.

The bottom mat completes the matting of your artwork. Certainly one of the main reasons we use mat boards to encase art is decorative: to bring out the colours in an image while drawing in the eye. This is where the inner mat comes into play. With only about 1/4" or 1/8" exposed beneath the top mat, the bottom mat is usually selected to beautifully bring out accent colours hidden within the artwork.

There are many creative and elegant techniques that can be used to add distinction to your framed artwork, creating a museum like quality to the piece. The addition of matting can mean the difference between an insignificant piece that gets lost on a wall and a dramatic one that serves as a perfect accent for a room. All of our matting is exclusively acid-free, museum quality conservation matting. This means that your artwork will be fully protected, and no materials or techniques will be used that cannot be reversed, leaving the art undamaged and in its original state.

Artwork on canvas needs exposure to air and should not be encased behind glass. For this reason, we do not offer matting or glass for canvas pieces.

Artwork on paper should be matted so that a border of the paper remains visible. When the print is signed and numbered, a bottom heavy border will allow the signature to show within the finished framed piece. Our framers will automatically do this for you.

The Glass

All glass is not created equal. In order to preserve, protect and get the most out of your artwork, you have to think about some important attributes of both your artwork and your home.

If the item you are framing is one-of-a-kind, rare, irreplaceable, of great monetary or sentimental value, or if the room you are hanging it in receives above average direct sunlight or fluorescent light, then you should frame your art with UV protection conservation glass/Plexiglas.

We offer both plain and UV protection Plexiglas. Museums across the country have been using Plexiglas for years to protect their works and reduce any distortion of images. Plexiglas also eliminates the risk of shattered glass and is much lighter in weight, which means less stress on your hanging hardware and more protection for your art.

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