Rone grew up in the city of Geelong, Victoria, before making the move to Melbourne. In 2002, he started decorating skateboards and skate parks. Since then, his work has spread to the streets and inner-city laneways of Melbourne, and into some galleries and exhibitions. Rone lives in a small flat so he uses stencil art as a creative outlet. In 2003 police caught Civilian and Rone at the Canterbury “Empty Show”, but no criminal charges were ever laid. Rone loves skateboarding and works as a graphic designer from the Everfresh studios in Collingwood. On graffiti, Rone says:
"I always had a respect for graffiti. There was something about it that appealed to me, I think it was the risk of putting something up that will be judged by so many, the risk that someone will hate it and paint over it, or it will be praised by someone you’ll never meet."
Rone and his work appear in Rash, Australia's first feature-length documentary on street art and graffiti, which explores its cultural value.
Media
On the streets, Rone's preferred places to stencil are high traffic areas. Rone often paints in broad daylight. Rone's larger images require much more time to put up, so he uses wheat pasting to do quick paste-ups in busy locations . He likes that paste-ups can be used irrespective of the wall background and the way that aging and deteriorating of the paste-up can lead to striking and unique effects. Rone's main form of stencils are large images of women's faces mostly cropped which tower and look upon people that walk by. Rone's art by rule, does not contain any political messages. He says:
"If you think about it too much, it becomes a problem. I paint because want to bring the streets alive."
He also says:
"I paint because I love it, and it adds character to any inanimate object. Whether it is a wall or a footpath. It brings the streets to life."
Influence
While Ha-Ha, who is considered to be Melbourne's most famous street artist because of the massive number of stencil tags he puts up, has slowed in production of late, Rone is gaining a reputation as the city's most prolific street artist. A quote from Jake Smallman, co-author of Stencil Graffiti Capital: Melbourne, on the question "Who is Melbourne's most prolific stenciler and how did they become so renowned?"
"When I started working on the book it was without doubt Ha-Ha - the guy was simply everywhere. Not only would he paint in a lot of areas, but repeat his images over and over again on the same wall. He got to that position by having a regimented plan to go out regularly with two cans of paint and not come home until he'd used them up. He's been a bit quiet of late, so in terms of consistently getting up over the last 3 years, I'd have to say Rone. His stencils have gotten larger and larger and the placements more and more bold over time."
Rone is building influence in the streets. He mainly stencils around:
Rone's art demonstrates influence by a great many people and sources. These include, among others: the 1980s and '90s, skateboarding, video games, Shepard Fairey and Banksy. His favorite cartoon character is Frosty the Snowman. Rone's re-contextualising of fashion images has had interesting repercussions. The Age newspaper reported that a model, whose face was used in Rone's "Jane Doe" series, eventually searched out the artist three years after seeing a large-scale thirty-year-old image of her face painted on a wall.
