Interview by Jimon
1. Where do you call home currently? I currently call Austin, Texas home. Although I am a Northern California kid and lived all over the world, I am now a pure Texan.
2. How long have you been making art and what lead you to start? I have always created art. I started creating at 4 years old when I used to draw and name new species on napkins at the dinner table. Probably from my complete and utter fascination with “Where the Wild Things Are.” My Uncle was a world renowned sculptor and Raku artist. He passed away when I was young, but his legend has always inspired me to be an artist. I was an interesting mix, I played basketball on a scholarship and studied art in college. After I would finish playing basketball, I regularly would paint, with a dream of doing it someday for a living. After years of working as a Retail manager, Band manager, Graphic designer, Art director, Marketing director, Missionary, Entrepreneur, PR director, Fashion designer, Web commerce, Crowd funding consultant, and a few other things, I took the giant step to pursue art full time a few years ago. In 2016 I completed my first Artist residency in Budapest, Hungary and I am confident that my work is progressing in ways I have only dreamed about.
3. Did you study art or is it a gift? Both. My high school art teachers Mario, Toby and Kim (I love you) started the drive and one of my College Professors instilled it. It also helped that my grandparents were extremely cultured and my grandfather would teach me about the masters in art, poetry, literature and music (classical).
4. It has been said art is a gift from god, to make the world a better place. What are your thoughts on that? I like that. I think that is something truly wonderful. If you believe in God as the creator, then you would have to believe that being a creator is an echo of God’s love, the echo being a gift inside of you that reflects the Creator. You would also have to acknowledge the possibility that all art does not make the world a better place. I do believe that art should be true. My goal as an artist is to share truth through my work. I want to share story through my work, the story of struggle and hope, life and balance, tension and release, tragedy and joy. My work speaks through the story of one’s life and the human condition becoming intertwined between the two. As one of my favorite authors Madeline L’Engle says,
“In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure…
The artist must be obedient to the command of the work, knowing that this involves many hours of research, throwing out a month’s works, of going back to the beginning, or, sometimes, scrapping the whole thing.
When the art means even more than the artist knew they meant, then the artist has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led to places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand.”
5. You shoot time-lapse videos of yourself while painting and post them on YouTube. Is this specifically for the world or is it a form of self education? It started out as “for the world.” I want to be fully intentional and transparent with my work and process. I think that the art world has always had a selfish fear attached to it, and I understand why, artists don’t want people to completely steal their process and style. But that is how we all become who we are as artists, we are all inspired by somebody, and we are all very similar in thought and movement to other artists. Because of these similarities, studying art, going to galleries or museums, we are constantly grabbing bits and pieces of others work and it becomes part of ours. I want people to see my process and ask questions, if I can help them become better artists in any way then I am being who I was created to be.
6. Best advice you ever received in regards to your career as an artist? A few years ago when I left the entrepreneur world to paint full time, I took all of my current work out to Los Angeles to meet with a few of my art school peers. One is possibly the worlds greatest street art critic and author who just finished a bio with Kenny Scharf (Kenny Scharf- In Absence of Myth). One of the key items that I took away from that meeting is that you have to be showing, all the time, anywhere you can. A wall is a wall, a show is a show, no matter how big or how small, fill your CV with shows. I also popped over to spend time with possibly my greatest influence as an artist, American Sculptor William Catling, who was a professor of mine. After discussing the art world and his experience in it he told me, “you are entering a career that is not a career and you need to be prepared for that”. I think coming out of the startup business community, I was fully prepared. As an artist you are the creator of the product, the sales team, the marketing team, web and design, the secretary, shipping and handling and customer service. You are the entire business with no help. It is not easy. All of that, on top of constantly painting and taking risks with your work. How bad do you want it?
7. How do you define success? That word seems to define people more than people define it. My success as an artist is entirely wrapped up in the voice that it carries. If my work can inspire people, speak to people, touch people’s lives. I would define that as success.
8. Do you listen to music while creating? If yes, what genre? I make playlists for every studio session. My Spotify account is overflowing. I listen to all genre of sound. Everything depends on my emotions that day, or the series I have been studying and documenting. Lately I have been addicted to Peter Broderick, The War on Drugs, Neutral Milk Hotel, Joy Division, Sneaks, Strand of Oaks, Max Richter, Olafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm, and Shearwater. My music choices are a lot like my work, messy, full of movement and very purposeful.
9. What advice would you give putative collectors? I will take their advice! Why do you want to collect art? Where does that interest come from? What is it about specific styles of work that fill your soul? How does art speak to you?
If they can answer the last three questions they should be investing in art or investing in artists as a patron.
10. Do you have a place/person/thing that you visit for inspiration? I have a lot of people that I visit for inspiration and most of them are dead. They reside in book and picture now. I visit them not only for inspiration, but for knowledge and wisdom. To paraphrase and change another Madleine L’Engle quote,
“Each of these men and women, whose paintings I stand before or words I read and admire in a great fashion. They are just that, all men, all women and all dead, Their distance from us in chronology seems to give them an overwhelming authority. But they were not dead when they created, and they were as human as the rest of us.”
11. If you could have dinner with 3 artists living/dead who would be at your table? Oh man, you are putting me in a serious bind to have to choose. I would have to say Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler and my Uncle Conway “Jiggs” Person who passed when I was young. What I would give to sit and ask him questions and have him teach me how to throw clay!
12. Three things you can’t live without in your studio? My Stereo
13. How would you like to be seen as an artist years from now? I think about this a lot. I am always, to no avail, trying to see into the future. I just hope I am creating incredible work and showing it on a regular basis. I would love to be showing internationally regularly. I create a lot of work. I am hoping to be doing that for years to come.
14. Anything else you’d like to mention that I didn’t ask? No but I will leave you in parting words from the beautiful E.E. Cummings,
“I who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday,
this is the birthday of life and love and wings;
and of the gay great happening illimitably earth…
now the ears of my ears are awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened.”
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