Banking on Banksy

Could this be the best ever investment of a student loan?

10 years ago, while studying at Bristol University, Gez Smith decided to buy a painting by a little-known local artist called Banksy.

A decade later, with Banksy's fame having rocketed, the work is up for auction and expected to be sold for tens of thousands of pounds.

It's a long way from student digs in Bristol to Sotheby's auction house on Bond Street. But for Gez Smith it is turning out to be a very lucrative journey indeed.

When he was just 19 he used £300 of his student loan to buy a painting he quite liked the look of.

It was by Banksy - then unknown, but today Britain's hottest street graffiti artist.

Riot Green is one of Banksy's earliest works. Gez had it above his bed. When he first contacted Sotheby's they sent a van to collect it immediately, so concerned were they that it was hanging in his flat uninsured.

Sotheby's first started selling Banksy at auction last year. Despite his growing commercial success, his identity remains secret. He keeps in the headlines by hanging his own paintings in the Tate, and grafittiing the security wall dividing Israel and Palestine.

But will his works hold their value in time?

Gez's student friends thought he was mad using a loan to buy a painting. Hanging down the hall from his Banksy is another graffiti artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who made his name in America in the eighties.

Back then it was bought for $3,000. Next month it's expected to sell for $6 million.

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