Sometimes I feel like I was born with a paintbrush in my hand, and a wrench in the other. And then I had extra hands which held a guitar. Maybe one more additional hand to grasp a sandwich while I'm doing the other three things simultaneously.
I always had a penchant for art, but not the kind of art that would hang in any museum. The works of the Renaissance masters did nothing for me. Just as I find more gratification in the Ramones or Guitar Wolf instead of Beethoven's 5th, so goes the same with art.
I grew up in the 70s in suburban New Jersey, right over the GWB from New York City. On the weekends, I would ride my poop brown 5-speed Ross Apollo down to Cedar Lane in Teaneck to meet up with my buddies at Rocklin's - an old-timey corner store and newsstand that would sell fireworks and Hustler magazines to kids. They had a pretty huge rack of comics, which my friends would devour by the stack (sometimes swiping a few extra ones under their hoodies.) But not me - I didn't have the attention span to sit through endless storylines like a soap opera - I needed my fix in tiny vignettes, and Mad magazine accomplished that task for me.
My parents were usually very supportive of anything my siblings and I showed even the slightest interest in (not counting my passion for mild vandalism and petty larceny) so when they saw I was into drawing stuff in the margins of my school notebooks, before I knew it, I was getting an easel, paints, and art supplies for my birthdays.
Soon after, when I discovered something that combined the art and humor of Mad with another of my passions - wild hot rods - I felt a true calling. Enter CARtoons magazine.
To me, this was it - psychotic, untamed hot rods with engines higher than the cars' rooflines, smoke belching out of oversized rear tires, flames shooting from sidepipes, all while being piloted by some drooling, bloodshot-eyed, snarling monster grasping a stickshift that protruded out the sunroof. This spoke to me.
Ed Roth was my art hero. Sure, Jack Davis and Al Jaffee were the first to grab my eye in the pages of Mad, but they were otherwise normal folks - artists doing a job. Roth LIVED it. He was every bit a character as the unhinged monstrosities he created. Even the cars he built were living incarnations of his cartoons. He imagined it, he penned it, and then he went one step further than all the other artists - he built it. And they were fucking WILD.
I'm not going to go through the entire timeline of my art life - I'd be here for a few days solid trying to remember it all. I just needed to give you a little background of my first bits of inspiration, what led me down my path of bizarre pop surrealism. So, let's just say that natural progression has led me to what I do now.
Most of my stuff just comes from random ideas that I'll get in my head late at night that give me a little chuckle. What if an enraged rabbit used a carrot as a weapon? What if a turkey drumstick had a turkey head on it? What if Quasimodo and a plum tomato had a love child?
I'll likely post a whole lot more in the very near future, but for now, I just wanted to give you all a little peek inside my brain.
Thanks for checking out my stuff.
