We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Giovanni Laporta Zark. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Giovanni Laporta below.
Alright, Giovanni Laporta thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I always lived thinking that passion can turn into job if one really wanted to, my mother always created and sold her stuff, she was into diy markets, making custom bags, crochet items and dolls. However this was never her main job, she always kept art as a side hustle and kept being a librarian full-time.
I started drawing and doing graffiti at a really young age, but my family was always afraid of the dangerous path of the full-time artist.
During high school and right after it, it looked like I was about to follow a completely different path, I studied in an aeronautical school, worked a month in an airport, did an internship in logistics.
As unintuitive as it may sound, the more possibilities I was finding outside of art, the more I felt like I had to try doing it full-time. Knowing that even if you fail you still have options allowed me to take it less heavily, and considering how hard it is, it really helped me to avoid stress.
To sum it up, after a few attempts at other jobs, in 2018 I decided to dive deeper into art and took the risk of moving to another city and attend the finest academy In Milano.
Giovanni Laporta, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I was born in Lecce, in the south of Italy. My Journey in stylewriting started in 2011: at the time I was a very hyperactive kid and after months of begging I convinced my parents to spray paint one of the surrounding walls of a field we used to own. Since then I basically never stopped, my main focus has always been on developing complex pieces with a big focus on letter structure and characters.
I grew up reding a lot of marvel comic books and watching pixar movies, the first characters I tried sketching were all super heroes, slowly I started digging more and more into fine art, practicing character design and anatomy, until in 2018 I decided to move to Milano and enroll at the Brera Academy of fineart.
In the last few years my artistic practice has shifted significantly, since I started working on painted canvases, mural commissions and live performances, I was also lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with important companies like Oneday group, Tag colors, Lamborghini and NYX Cosmetics.
Piled up, all these experiences, helped me become a very versatile artist, able to work not only on street art but also in different fields, from illustration to graphic design and much more
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Painting large murals can get messy at times, once me and mrWany were painting a big mural and we got stuck at 20+ meters on a lift, we had to wait more than an hour before someone came to rescue us, in the mean time we kept painting, the lucky part was that we were stuck in a section of the mural that needed a lot of detail so we actually didn’t loose a lot of work time.
Murals in general always represent a big challenge when it comes to the logistics and the bureaucracy behind it, you may not think about it when you see a finished piece, but it requires a huge amount of organisation, financial planning, material sourcing, sketching, long conversations with the clients and long nights awake.
Sometimes, when we paint for events, these headaches are taken care of by the organisers of the event, but problems are always behind the corner and you may have to change your plans.
Another story from last year was about a mural I painted with 7 other people, we were planning to paint it in 3 days but the materials arrived on the last day of painting, which forced us to change the sketch last minute and paint the full mural in less than 24 hours.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
Working on street art means that the size, the surface and the surrounding always changes, and it always teaches you something, the most rewarding aspect of it is for sure the amount of pragmatic knowledge you get on site.
When working outside of Italy another rewarding aspèct was the connection with the locals, people you see every day as your painting comes to life often become friends, and that’s another untold beauty of this culture.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sites.google.com/view/zarkoner/menu
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/Zarkoner
- Linkedin: Giovanni (Zarkoner) Laporta
- Youtube: https://YouTube.com/Zarkoner
Image Credits
I want to cite Sowet for being part of the two big murals that you can see in the pictures (the one with the black background and the one with the yellow-green background)