We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Frank Bonanno . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Frank below.
Hi Frank, thanks for joining us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?
Sooner. I moved to Hollywood when I was 27. By then I had already accumulated so much student debt, borrowed so much money from my parents, and generally wasted so much time that eventually my time out there trying just sort of ran out due to life’s many realities. Had I instead skipped college and gone right out of high school and done exactly what I did, I feel very confident I’d have found my way into full time permanent career.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I have loved the arts for my whole life and I have alway found different ways to involve myself in that world. I fell in love with welding in college so I went to work for a local blacksmith after college for a while. I also spent about 2-3 years as a tattoo artist but the people who were teaching me kept suffering misfortune themselves, resulting in me becoming an independent artist that never really got the full training that was necessary. I shot big and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in production/set design and I did that for roughly four years. It was at this time that I went through all my starving artist stuff- I lived in a stairwell, I lived on a couch, I lived with 15 people on bunk beds in a 2 bedroom house, I took the public bus or just ran to work. This is where I really suffered for my craft and became the person I am today. Through all this time I learned scenic painting and faux finish work, I learned carpentry and furniture building, I learned drafting and design, I designed and built things like fully functional suspension bridges, dungeons, train compartments on a shake rig, I built Fox sports desks, I worked for Obama, Marvel, Star Wars and The Walking Dead.Eventually I caught a little success only to have it all come crashing down and bring me back home. There I continued doing sets but in a much different capacity where I was now building window displays for retail or events. Eventually, I moved to Florida where I became an art teacher and once there I began painting and drawing and creating art that I then began selling. I have a website now and I take commission work and I do little local events and gallery shows. I also do work as a graphic artist creating logos and other digital fare and I have my mural/interior finish business sort of forever on the side. When I am working for a client, it’s typically a fairly painless process, every now and then – be it on a tattoo, a logo or something I’m about to paint on a wall, I have to explain away an idea that just doesn’t work but that’s fairly easy most of the time, I just present them with a few better options. Every now and then its also my job to just swallow my pride and give the customer what they want.
In terms of what I want everyone to know about me and my work- I guess it’s this: I always try and do something different and more creative and I would rather make zero dollars than thrive off just ripping off some famous artist’s style or pieces or just exploiting someone else’s IP. On the occasion that I do dabble in those fields, it’s more for my own entertainment than it is for financial gain and even then I try to do something to make it my own and present it in a way that is unexpected. I tend to run in the opposite direction of everyone else. It took me until season 4 to start watching Game of Thrones because when everyone is doing it, it intrinsically makes me want to avoid it. I grew up punk rock and while the fashion never took root the ethos is embedded deep in me. Sometimes I make statements with my work, sometimes I don’t. People on the outside will sometimes tell me “You’re all over the place” but to me, I see very clear through lines in all the things I do and find them inexorably linked. If you want a piece from me, you’re going to get something unique, with some attitude and some power. I try to make my stuff striking visually and typically I find it stands out from the pack I often find myself in, not from a standpoint of superiority, because what does that even mean, but I feel like there is a lot of stuff that is being made that is all so very similar and I don’t really feel as though anyone is similar to me which i think is more important than if someone is marginally more skilled than me. I can work in pretty much any style and I can play the hits too, so if you want me to emulate a Dali or a Van Gogh, I can. If you want abstract I got you. But I am always going to push towards something more inspired. I don’t care if I sell work or not, I’ve seen what I have to become to do that and I would rather remain independent and have some of you trickle toward me than totally sell out (as many people have implored me to do) and just start painting flamingos and sea turtles and Spider-man. I’d love to just knock out knock offs all day long and rake in the cash but thats never been me.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
They need to start recognizing just how heavily they depend on us for their very survival and stop clutching their pearls when it comes time to pay up. Art is still looked at by many as a “non-career” and every parents worst nightmare to hear out of a child’s lips. “There’s no money in that” and they aren’t wrong. But also, they are. Nobody knows what it takes to be an artist, the hours, the sacrifice, the pain. Furthermore, now having spent these last 6 years as a teacher, paired with my own educational experiences and background, I’ll say nobody is teaching people how to be artists. Not really. Then you end up with a bunch of adults flailing in the dark, paying people to tell them how to market themselves in the most homogenous way possible because that’s what sells. Meanwhile society consumes art constantly. We need to rethink everything. Society needs to regain the respect it once had for artists and we need to rethink the way we teach art completely. I had to issue my kids a 50 question fill in the bubble test at the end of the year to “assess their understanding” but that was total horse shit. It was a vocabulary test and a reading test disguised as an art test. The idea of a test in any capacity is absurd and shows just how tone deaf the people in charge are. Art should be treated like a trade, like a plumber or an electrician. It should be unionized so that people can’t fuck us about with how much money we make and we should be re-inserted as a class of people. Art school should comprise rigorous skill building but also business training and marketing. Every person should graduate knowing fully how to not only create but to manage the business of creation. They treat us like we are beneath them yet rare are the fields wherein you start with absolute zero and build from there again and again. Artists and scientists. Everyone else is just a cog in the machine. Baseball players make hundreds of millions of dollars yet the people who film, animate, design, build, compose, write, sing, dance and otherwise create all the things that people listen to, watch, read, hang on their walls, stare at through their screens, etc. are all struggling and heavily weighing out the risks and dangers of giving up their full time jobs to go make art and then they have no space to do anything but live in the box that some marketing expert told them they had to live in in order to make that living. We are simultaneously the most and least valued members of society, left to our own devices whilst filling an insatiable need all on our own. All of that needs to change.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
When I moved out of the stair case and into the 2 bedroom house with bunkbeds and 15 people, turned out I knew the landlord. I had worked with him previously. So he actually handed me my first job as a production designer, doing and Ebay spec commercial. Day 1 went well, we shot from 6am to 6pm- set days are always at minimum 12 hours long. I went out that night and saw a movie and watched a ufc event and got home around midnight, having to be back on set by 6 am again the next day. When I got home, pretty much everyone was out except for one dude who lived on one of the couches in the living room. This meant no line for the bathroom and I could hop right into the shower. As soon as I had hit that point of fully being soaked, I heard a huge crash and calls for help. Without taking time to dry off, i threw my clothes back on and went out to see the problem. Guy on the couch was nowhere to be found but I did bump into my landlord, who had shaved his head bald since last I had seen him and had a very crazy look in his eye. He shoved right past me and into the room which we happened to cohabitate. While the rest of us were in bunks, he had a California king on the other side of a partition he made by hanging a sheet from the ceiling. I watched him march in, tear the sheet down and start very aggressively confronting his girlfriend. I didn’t like the look of it, but I took pause because as she was getting up to deal with this, I noticed she was totally bottomless and indeed struggled to put pants on for the opening parts of the argument. At some point he shoved her, but this chick was tough so she shoved him right back, Him, being a much larger person and her being more my height, grabbed her by the face and threw her over his shoulder to the ground and then sat on her in full mount in what appeared to be the beginning of him beating the living shit out of her. I ran over and grabbed him before he could and ripped him off her. It was at this point I started figuring out how out of his mind drunk he was. I was trying not to hurt him, just sort of contain him but he was much taller than me and he eventually got an arm loose and cracked me in the face with it. I decided at that point that I had had enough and I put him on the ground and wrapped him up in a head and arm choke, I was still just trying to get him to calm down though. He kept resisting so I put a little bit of a squeeze on him and asked him again to calm down. Again he was resistant. So I squeezed a little tighter, thinking that if he just felt how strong I was and how in control, he would give up. Rather than that, he just continued to threaten me through gasps of air. So I squeezed a little tighter and put him to sleep. As soon as I felt his body go limp, I let go, He took a big gasp of air, then began vomiting projectile status all over the place. However in the midst of this, he was still repeatedly trying to get up, push past me and get to his girl who had left the room by now. So, I continued to fight this guy for who knows how long, as he rushed me, slipped on his own puke, fell, lay in it vomiting more and threatening me from the floor. Rinse and repeat. on and on it went. FINALLY the cops showed up and took him away. Somehow, I was also stuck mopping up all the vomit so I did that too, then got back in the shower. It was 3 am by the time all of this was done and I had to be back at work across town in 3 hours. So I took about an hour nap, got up, went and worked another 12 hours or so, came home, packed all my shit, called a friend, told him what happened and asked if I could come crash on his couch, slept one more night with a knife under my pillow- because in my mind if you’ll attack a woman you’ll definitely attack the sleeping dude who had kicked your ass to stop you- woke up the next day and moved onto my friends couch, where I ended up staying for the subsequent one year, three months and nineteen days.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.brushandbladeart.com
- Instagram: brush_and_blade_art
- Facebook: brush and blade artistic solutions
Image Credits
frank bonanno