I want to jump back a second. Your life as a graffiti writer and your life as a fine artist, too, are inspired by comics, animation, and skate graphics—just real, authentic visual culture that wasn’t based on a fine art lexicon. I always thought you were the closest thing to an essential aesthetic of this magazine: where Robert Williams and graffiti collided. Did you find yourself a bit of an outcast with your inspirations once you got to art school, or are we so far past that at this point?
My favorite visual stimuli are from various subcultures and fandoms. I am currently working on a painting that cites furry culture; yet, it is subverting Manet’s Olympia painting, where she has a “fursona.” On the other hand, the picture plane is peppered with sassy Buldak ramen mascots. I am drawn to caricaturesque depictions of the figure, regardless of medium. I mostly pull from film these days, with lots of screenshots, and yes, the unapologetically imaginative works of Robert Williams have planted seeds in my formal desires since adolescence. Williams, along with artists like Jim Shaw, are what encouraged me to make large scale narrative paintings.
Maybe you don’t, but do you remember the first time you pulled something like this off? Like taking an element from subculture, art history, and say, popular culture like ramen and making work? It sort of takes real insight to get here.
While working as an illustrator with Upper Playground, I did a set of pieces portraying famous rappers in fantastic situations. The series mood board had the farty humor of Garbage Pail Kids’ trading cards. I adopted it for the series, transforming Soulja Boy into a troll doll with a fluorescent pink gemstone in his belly button. “Trollja Boy Tellum,” get it? I was 22; what can I say? That was in 2008, so it’s been part of my practice for a while now.
In each of your paintings, you drop little clues, little autobiographical elements that only you and a close knit group of friends and family would understand. In the massive painting that was in your studio the other day, there was a nod to your mother and Mark Bode graffiti dropped in. Tell me about these elements you place on, well, often, on the bottom of your paintings—these little borders that contain so much information.
Consider each grouping of tiny figures to be a melody to the painting, a soundtrack. These figures provide depth, making the central figures appear totemic. When you pair smaller forms next to larger ones, they appear massive. My work applies contrasting strategies, whether scale shifts or contrast shifts, or dense patterning to void spaces, in order to slow down the viewer’s read of the imagery and to dictate focal points.
You are part of the unique legacy of a group of Afro-Futurist and Pop Surrealist painters that have been given both new attention and deserved reexamination. I was even thinking about you the other day when Kerry James Marshall came up, and I was thinking about his comic work and the incredibly bold storytelling he does. But there is a great group of painters that have come from Afro-Futurist and Pop Surrealist aesthetics, and I wonder where you feel you fit in.
The current work aligns with movements like post-internet art and, to an extent, zombie figuration. I recently discovered the work of the Narrative Figurative movement in Paris, and I share the philosophies that artists like ERRO convey with the collaging of appropriated imagery.
Most work I see today, especially by artists younger than myself, seems to have some connection to the tropes of pop surrealism due to its timely references, collaging together of atypical imagery, and highly imaginative and ambitious Frankenstein paintings. I love it.
What’s the part of finishing your MFA that excites you?
Earning my terminal degree excites me. It took all my life; I earned it.
