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posted: January 16, 2011

posted: December 13, 2010

Losing my love for Basketball
At the top of the street where I lived were two basketball courts. When I was twelve, I used to play on those courts all the time with a bunch of late teen early twenty something’s. Like many youngens, I followed the leader for the most part. They cursed, I cursed, they spit, I spit. I drew the line at smoking, though I still wanted to look cool so I “smoked” candy cigarettes that I bought from the store. The store I am talking about was located not to far away from the basketball courts, acting as the focal point in the whole trailer park. If you needed milk, and didn’t want to run into town, you just went to the store right here in the park. It seemed really fancy to live in a trailer park that had a store, basketball courts and even a swimming pool but I was spoiled and didn’t care. Anyway, every once in a while we would go up to the store, and buy Sprites, water, or candy and continue on to playing more basketball.

The rule of the house I lived in was that I had to be at home when the streetlights turned on, so a lot of times I left in the middle of a game to go home. The older kids would continue on playing until it got to dark to play. One summer night, I heard loud sirens and people yelling outside. My parents got me out of bed so we could see what all the fuss was about. The store had caught on fire. My first thought was “where am I going to get candy cigarettes at now?” Later the next day, the fire department determined that the cause of the fire was from a lit cigarette butt thrown in a trash can that caused the flame. I got angry, and somehow made the connection that the older kids I hung out with were the cause of this. They were the ones that destroyed a good thing that everyone enjoyed. I stopped playing basketball that summer, picked up skateboarding and started listening to Black Flag.

posted: November 20, 2010

***For my thesis, I am writing a series of memoir like stories and creating a full-page illustration to accompany them. The stories are somewhat hard luck stories with some kind of upswing realization at the end. I am posting a short version of the essay so that you get the idea of what the image is about without reading a huge essay. My advisor overseeing and art directing my project is Rachel Solomon.***

A Lifeguards observations.
I worked for seven years as a lifeguard in the trailer park I grew up in. Year after year, the other guards and I would see teenage girls getting pregnant. It was a bit of a moral epidemic in our neighborhood. Shamefully, the way we dealt with it, was that we all bet on who would be the next girl to walk through the gates with a baby stroller. Money was never really exchanged but the concept was there. For years I bet on the same girl. I don't know why, but I did. Maybe it was because every summer she had a different boyfriend, or maybe it was the friends she hanged out with. I always bet on her. Two years after quitting my job as a lifeguard, I did end up bumping into that girl while visiting home one summer. She was going college, focused in her studies and was making something of herself. I was relieved that not everyone would be anchored in the trailer park that I grew up in, within the fate I ignorantly doomed upon everyone. We all make choices, and we all make mistakes.

posted: November 15, 2010

I am very excited and humbled to be invited into the Giant Robot LA | Post It Note 6 show, curated by Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson.

For the post it notes I am submitting, I thought I would take random images from my sketch book and killed sketches to be made into painted images. Some pieces are deep, meaningful and have a back story, while others I made because I thought they would make a cool images with loose interpretations.

The Opening will be at Giant Robot in Los Angeles, CA on December 11th. Huge thanks to Mark and Esther for inviting me to be part of the show.

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