I started drawing dinosaurs when I was five. Mom bought me a whole set of books. I learned every line and every name of each of them. I walked squares around the yard rebuilding their world without the books. Putting the lines back together. In the country these internal worlds can become tangible places. In the silence of Bradley Road I could hear them eating big leaves… and each other.
What fantastic and beautiful things. This one eats leaves and this one eats the one that eats the leaves so it grows a tail with a club or spikes or travels in packs or all of the above. It wants sex without conversation so it adorns itself with frills and thick boned skulls to fight all the other boys. Metaphorically speaking I don’t think anything has changed about animals except we are more boring now and eat each other less frequently. Mastication, even, is still done with either teeth or a beak, though the arrangement has changed the plan has stayed the same. Why not think about dinosaurs for days. I want to be four again.
Well all of this was only to introduce you to how I started drawing. I drew and I daydreamed and that was just about it.
Later, when I admitted to myself that I could never be a dinosaur or have a dinosaur or see a dinosaur and especially not ride one, I decided that I liked to draw mutants instead because I saw an increased likelihood of becoming one of those.
I did become one of those. Socially deranged, completely unwilling to adapt to normative society, ready for something new.
I tried and I tried to be good at so many other things. I was a winemaker’s apprentice, a canon crew-member, a busboy, a screen printer/cleaner… the list goes on. Nothing stuck. Nothing felt forever. Nothing felt like it was what I was made to do.
And then comes tattooing. All of a sudden 25 years of drawing experience drawing dinosaurs and freaks and naked women becomes a Curriculum Vitae.
Draw every day. My hands are my future and it is time to draw that future out.
I feel like a rapper who writes inflamatory lyrics about the purity of their process. I took a gift and I hustled it and I worked harder than anybody I know to be the realest artist I could be and all of that work is finding a home now in my life. My dreams can grow to the next stage: to combine printing, tattooing, house fixing and coffee into a reasonable life.
And find someone to share that with.
Who is not insane.
The Paper Trail 