Graffiti Artist John (JonOne) Perello
Graffiti artist JonOne Perello once painted the walls of Harlem, but since then he has won international acclaim. Alexandra Carroll meets him as he gets to work on an enormous canvas in Festival Walk, and asks him how he feels about making art in a mall.
HK Magazine: What’s it like working in front of other people?
JonOne Perello: It’s OK. I don’t mind. Sometimes people talk to me but they seem more timid here. If this were New York, they’d be like, “Hey! Do you have permission to do this? Do you get paid? Where’d you get the paint?”
HK: Have you ever worked in a mall before?
JP: I’ve done this kind of thing before. Agnes b. commissioned me to work in her store in 2003. And this is the idea I get about Hong Kong - this is it. Hong Kong people love their malls. When I first got here, malls were, like, the big attraction. Everyone wanted to take me to malls.
HK: Is a lot of your working time spent on these big, public projects?
JP: Not always. Most of the time it’s just being alone in the studio - the life of a monk. Sometimes I don’t see people for, like, five months. Then I come out for maybe two or three months and then I go back into my home. You’d be very surprised. It takes a lot of time to develop. My 3mx4m piece [to be shown at Art Statements Gallery] took at least two months. You can’t do it in one shot; you have to go over and over it. There’s a lot of patience involved.
HK: You use acrylic paint, you create on canvas – would you really describe yourself as “a graffiti artist”?
JP: I don’t know if I’m a typical graffiti writer. This lady from one of the newspapers didn’t seem to like what I was doing here so she bought me a spray can, took me out to Mongkok and made me spray on a wall. I wasn’t really comfortable with that but, you know, she had an image she wanted. The word “graffiti” has associations and she wanted that image.
HK: Is graffiti art universal – can you understand it everywhere?
JP: No, it’s completely different. You gotta know where to look and how to look. You gotta go deep into the subject to see that they are expressing different things. I met these Brazilian guys in Berlin and they’re completely mad. They do their own style of thing – their own handwriting style that looks like Iron Maiden covers - they don’t have a lot of money for spray paint so they use house paint and big rollers. They use what they’ve got. Art used to be about forming a school, a group identity, like, for example, the Impressionists, they all had to comply with rules and ideas. Today’s art is more about individual expression.
HK: Do your pieces require a lot of attention and planning?
JP: Yeah, I kind of know what I’m going to do but it does require some sort of focus. But I’ve got these two other ones that are going to be really busy. And this one won’t be. I want people to follow a line of work, to feel and think different things. Like, “I feel something here, but I don’t like this one.” And that’s the hard part, trying to do that.