In an attempt to gain the favorable treatment of the older kids that lived in one of the curves of my U-shaped neighborhood, I began skateboarding at the age of eight. I was introduced to the world of the Bones Brigade, joined in the search for Animal Chin, and prepared for every grueling elementary school day by strapping on my Vision Street Wear with red and white speckled soles. Little did I know that this pathetic attempt to fit in with the 12-year-olds would prove to be the major building block for the person I have become.

You see, while I was skating my way into a future filled with knee and ankle injuries, skin grafts, and stitches; I was also becoming interested in the world of art. Don’t be misled, I certainly wasn’t taking trips to the local museum, or reading up on Georges Braque or Diego Rivera. What sparked my interest in drawing was that wooden plank bolted to polyurethane wheels, which rested below my feet. I became enamored with the graphics that had been screened on the undercarriage of my Vision Psycho Stick and any board designed by Mark Gonzales. These were the Great Masters I studied under. I would spend hours recreating skateboard designs that I had seen in the California Skate Express catalogue. Eventually, I began to hone my skills a bit, and I branched out into creating my own designs for boards that would never be made for me when I would eventually never turn pro.

Besides engendering my interest in art, skateboarding also turned me on to the wonderful world of underground music. The skateboarding videos that I had 6th generation VHS copies of and that were taped over such classics as The Never Ending Story, had soundtracks full of early hardcore and punk rock music. Through the tape hiss, the soft hum of wheels rolling across concrete, and the popping sound produced by the most famous of all skateboarding tricks (the one that all cops tell you they can do as they kick you out of the grocery store parking lot where you were skating in), ‘the ollie’, I was exposed to the sounds of the Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion, the Descendents, Black Flag, Minor Threat, the Dead Milkmen, Operation Ivy, Bad Brains and Seven Seconds.

Honestly, the music didn’t grab me right away. I was still young and had not really begun to identify with music. At this point I was still focusing on the skateboarding portrayed in the video while daydreaming of having an empty in-ground pool in my backyard. However, as the teenage years approached I began to pay attention to what was happening in underground music. Like skateboarding, music began to fuel my artistic side. I knew that I couldn’t even nod my head in time with the music I loved, so I decided I should shelve any dreams of becoming a musician and dedicate my life to drawing and painting portraits of the members of my favorite bands. This phase produced embarrassingly bad portraits of Ben Weasel, and even a ceramic nightmare sculpture of Lint (aka Tim Armstrong). Luckily I am no packrat, and those hideous objects have been discarded years ago. At the age of 16 I enrolled in a high school that was dedicated solely to the arts. There I studied painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and a bit of sculpture. This coincided with my intense interest in punk rock and punk rock culture. While my work did not directly reflect my admiration of the punk rock subculture, it was heavily influenced by it. A year after enrolling in this art school I began to be very active in the local underground music scene. I began to rent out a small cultural center on the outskirts of the New Orleans’ French Quarter. It was through this that my artwork first began to be used for a purpose and seen by others.

I had long been attracted to the gig flyers and the album covers that promoted my favorite bands. Now that I was booking shows, I was able to begin creating my own flyers. This also branched out into doing drawings for friends’ demo tapes and t-shirt designs. However, all of that was very primitive at the time, and as I conjure up images of those ghosts of designing past, I shake my head in shame. Of course when it comes to art and design I am a very self-critical judge, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as I am remembering (yes, it was).

After graduating from high school, I had a four-week stint in a local university. I dropped out because the art program was light-years behind the program I had just graduated from. The opportunity to go on the road as ‘the merch guy’ for my friends’ band also played a huge role in the decision to quit school. This was a great experience that certainly made dropping out of school worth it. Nothing beats sleeping on strangers’ floors, having cats attacking your head, driving through a blizzard at night with no headlights, sampling the generic colas that each region of the United States has to offer and watching as a snowball packed with dog feces explodes onto the chest of the guy you hate from the band that is sharing tour dates with you.

I returned from this tour broke. I needed to find a job. Since my gig promoting was certainly not an income maker (I generally paid the touring bands more than I collected at the door), I could not rely on this to support me. I fell into a job that was meant to be nothing more than a stopgap until the next college year intake. Unfortunately, this job developed into a career. I became a draftsman for a company that built compressor packages for oil companies. With the start of this drafting job, my artistic inspiration died a very painful death. I rarely drew anything for the flyers I produced to promote my shows. I resorted to using clip art, and typography driven flyers. Eventually, this job even sucked from me the desire to involve myself in the music scene. I quit booking gigs and nearly quit attending them. This prompted my very scene active friends, Dan Fox and Bryan Funck, to hand me a flyer telling me I was, ‘Kicked out of hardcore.’

Seven years after passing my drug screening for the dreaded drafting job I had what is known as the quarter life crisis. I knew I needed a drastic change in my life. I wanted to quit my job, but didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to go back to school, and start over completely. I also wanted to live outside of America for a while. I wanted to broaden my horizons, see new things and most of all, I wanted to be able to recount years later to a young American that, ‘I was one of the lucky ones who escaped during the first term of the Bush administration.’ So after much research I sold my house and moved to Singapore to study Visual Communications at the Raffles Design Institute, where I will be graduating with a diploma in December of 2006. This web site contains a sample of some of the works I have produced since leaving the United States. While there has been an eight-year gap between my art studies, my influences have remained the same, and I am happy to report that the inspiration has returned.