About Sean Bono: From Brooklyn Graffiti to Brand Murals on Both Coasts

The Short Version

I’m a professional muralist and the founder of Art Battles, the world’s first live competitive painting movement. I operate a hand-painted advertising agency between Venice Beach, California and Jacksonville Beach, Florida, creating large-scale commercial murals for major brands and local businesses.

I’ve been painting at scale for over twenty years. My client list includes Corona, Nike, and Hoka. My roots are in graffiti and street art, refined through formal training at Pratt Institute and the New York Studio School. I am, in the old tradition, a wall dog — an artist who braves the heights and elements to put paint on buildings.

The Longer Version

I grew up watching graffiti writers transform blank walls into something electric. Before I understood color theory or composition or art history, I understood that a painted wall could stop people in their tracks and change the energy of an entire block. That instinct has driven everything I’ve done since.

My formal art education took me through Pratt Institute and the New York Studio School — institutions that gave me the technical foundation in drawing, painting, and design that commercial work demands. But the real education happened in the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan in the early 2000s, surrounded by writers, painters, and hustlers who were building a creative culture from nothing.

That environment — raw, collaborative, competitive, and completely unconcerned with the traditional art world’s gatekeeping — is where Art Battles was born.

Art Battles: Birth of a Movement

In 2001, I organized the first Art Battles in a Manhattan lot. The concept was radical in its simplicity: put artists on stage, give them a time limit, let the audience decide who wins. Turn painting into a spectator sport.

Nobody was doing this. Live competitive painting didn’t exist as a format. There was no template, no precedent, no business model — just a conviction that art was too important to keep locked inside galleries and studios.

Art Battles grew from those Manhattan nights into a global movement. The format has been replicated and adapted around the world, introducing live painting to audiences who never would have set foot in a gallery. It proved something that I still believe: people are hungry for authentic creative experience, and when you remove the barriers and the pretension, art connects with everyone.

I’m currently developing my memoir about the founding of Art Battles — a story that begins four days before September 11, 2001, in a New York City that was about to change forever.

From Underground to Commercial

The transition from graffiti and underground art competitions to commercial muralism wasn’t a sellout — it was an evolution. The skills are the same: reading a wall, understanding scale, working fast, making decisions under pressure, and creating something that commands attention from a distance.

What changed was the canvas and the client. Instead of a warehouse wall at midnight, it’s a four-story building in broad daylight. Instead of painting for other writers, I’m painting for brands that need to connect with communities authentically. The craft is identical. The brushwork is the same. The stakes are higher, and the audience is bigger.

Commercial mural work, done right, serves the same purpose that the best street art has always served: it makes public space more interesting, more human, and more alive. The difference is that now someone’s paying for the paint.

Why Two Coasts

I split my time between Venice Beach and Jacksonville Beach because both communities need what I do, and because the dual-coast model gives my clients something no other independent muralist offers.

Venice Beach is one of the world’s most iconic mural markets. The boardwalk, Abbot Kinney, Lincoln Boulevard, and the surrounding neighborhoods are a living gallery where brands compete for wall space. Working in Venice keeps me connected to the cutting edge of street art culture and the LA creative industry.

Jacksonville Beach and Northeast Florida represent a market that’s exploding with potential. New development, a thriving food and drink scene, a growing creative class, and a coastal lifestyle that national brands are only beginning to discover. I’m building my presence on the First Coast as both an artist and an advocate for public art.

For national brands that want to activate in multiple markets, working with a single trusted artist across both coasts simplifies everything — consistent quality, established local relationships, and a unified creative vision.

What I Believe About Murals

A mural should earn its place on the wall. It should give something to the community, not just take visual space from it. The best commercial murals — the ones that get photographed, shared, and loved — are the ones where the brand message rides inside a piece of genuine art, not the other way around.

I also believe in the craft. Hand-painted means something. In an era of vinyl wraps, digital screens, and AI-generated imagery, the act of a human being standing on a scaffold with a brush, translating a design onto a building surface stroke by stroke — that act itself communicates values that no other advertising medium can match: patience, skill, care, and the irreplaceable quality of the human hand.

That’s what BonoPaints is about. Real paint. Real walls. Real craft.

Current Projects and Interests

Beyond commercial mural work, I’m currently developing:

∙ A major sculptural commission — a large-scale T-Rex carved and painted from a dried cypress log for a Jacksonville Beach business

∙ “Black Book” — a theatrical concept merging large-scale mural work with live competitive painting using ascension rig systems

∙ My memoir, chronicling the founding and growth of Art Battles from its underground origins

∙ “Mural Masters” — a documentary concept celebrating the artisan craft of professional muralism

Let’s Work Together

Whether you’re a global brand planning a mural advertising campaign, a local business that wants to transform your storefront, or an event producer looking for live painting that electrifies a room — I’d love to hear from you.

Every great mural starts with a conversation about a wall.