Older than any of it. The stencil is arguably the oldest image-making technique that survives: hand stencils on cave walls, made by blowing pigment around a hand held against the rock, are among the earliest surviving images anywhere. The principle has not changed — mask, apply, remove.

Pochoir. Stencil colouring was industrial long before it was subversive. European woodcuts were coloured through stencils from about 1450, and the French pochoir process was used commercially into the twentieth century for high-quality hand-coloured book and fashion plates.

Paris, 1981. Blek le Rat began painting stencilled rats on the streets of Paris in 1981 and is generally described as the father of stencil graffiti. He had seen New York wildstyle graffiti on a trip in 1971 and deliberately chose the stencil instead, on the grounds that it suited the classical architecture of Paris better than large freehand lettering. He was among the first to work at life size, which is what pulled the technique away from small tags and toward figures that read as people. He cut his stencils by hand. The pseudonym came from the comic character Blek le Roc, with 'rat' as an anagram of 'art' — and he described the rat as the only free animal in the city.

Why the technique spread. Speed and repeatability. A stencil that took a day to cut can be sprayed in fifteen seconds and used a hundred times, so an image can appear across a city in a single night by one person. That is a genuine property of the tool, and it cuts both ways: it is what made stencil art a recognisable movement, and it is also why the technique has a long association with property damage. The legal line is not a technical one — it is entirely about whose wall it is.

Postmodern

Blueprints (1)

Stencil Street Art