Me and Parker.
My son and me drawing. The piece I am working on is for my second solo show in New York City. My first was in the year of 2005 while I was living in Brooklyn. I lived for New York from 1999-2009, and it was an enlightening and challenging period of my life. I consider my time living therea learning experience and conquering of adverstiy more than a place where I captured my dreams, in fact, lving there became what I felt like a nightmare, so I suddenly moved in August of 2009. I was tired of the garbage strewn streets, the rat race, and the overall fakery of an art scene that left me completely disillusioned and uninspired. Because I chose to get out of New York, I was left with the hard choice of moving back in with my parents, penniless, and with very few prospects on the horizon. The next couple of years were a complete rebooting process. My fist job after being unemployed for a year, was with AmeriCorps. It paid nothing, but it was a start, and that lead me down my path of getting my master's degree and finding a job teaching graphic art and photography. When my son was born in October of 2012 my life would change in ways I could not imagine. His coming into this world watered a dormaint seed that had been sitting silently in my soul. As I watched him grow, that seed soon begin to flourish into an inspirational force to get back into making art, but it would not only be about making images, but putting a message of warning and inspriation of a better world, a better world I want all of our children and grand children to have. So it was on this Sunday afternnoon that Parker came to sit on my back as I work on a piece titled Engine of Chaos. It measures five by five feet, and the line work is beyond tedious. I was prepping this piece for my Ocotober 17th opening of ARTPOCALYPSE, not sure if I would finish as I would constantly examine all the space I had left to fill. Completeting a few square inches in my work feels like walking miles and miles. But as I would be up late at night, working on this after a full work day of teaching students, and at points of exhaustion, I would simply think to my self, 'Do this for Parker, make him proud.' So it is with much, much adversity that I have gone through the past fifteen years that I return to New York City with a body of work I know will be very, very powerful, humbling, and cathartic, and hopefully will maybe inspire a few to take a deeper look at the world around them.
