Artwork
About the Artist
I was born February 17th, 1999, on Maui Hawaii. My father was a farmer who grew produce and marijuana on the island and my mother was a dealer who sold the weed he grew. About a year after I was born, my parents got married and moved us to California where they started producing pornography and developed an expensive heroin dependency. As a result, I spent a fair amount of my childhood in various foster and group homes. I spent much of my life feeling powerless to control my environment and hold on to the things that I loved.
Through all of it, I was inspired to find inner strength through the graphic media I enthralled myself in. I was inspired to stay strong, and I was inspired to reach out and develop the skills to spread that strength to others. When I was 11 years old, I approached an artist in my class to ask for apprenticeship and spent years learning art independently under the loose tutelage of my good friend and various learn-to-draw books. In my third year of high school I finally began taking official art classes and developing my own style. I moved on to attend California State University Monterey Bay to earn a BA in Visual and Public Art so that I may fulfill my dream of being an independent graphic novelist.
Artist Statement
All my life, I have wondered why things are the way they are. As my loving but misguided parents left me alone for hours as they shot heroin and porn, I would sit, staring into my palms, wondering where my hands got their name and who had the authority to name them. I saw drugs tear my family apart, and as the world punished my parents for trying to reclaim any sense of honor or dignity, I would wonder why good people had to suffer. I met the children who had suffered far worse than I could imagine as well as the adults who profited from their suffering and wondered why the innocent suffered while scum prospered. I wondered how and why the universe could be so cruel.
I once asked my father, figuring that he would know better than anyone, he simply replied, “The universe punishes those who can handle it”. From that moment on, I accepted every trial I survived as proof of my strength. I began to hold the belief that I embodied a practically fantastic power that had been cultivated and passed on through generations of suffering in my family. An admittedly childish notion, but it led me to aspire to a new resilience that would help me cope with the traumas of my past and deal with the trials of my future.
I doubt I would have survived without believing in that strength, and as such, I believe that everyone needs a pillar of strength to look up to. I find that actual people make poor pillars, but ideas stand firmly. My earliest inspirations of strength came from comics and cartoons centered around characters that embodied my ideals by standing strong and prevailing against unrelenting pain and punishment and only showing weakness when they had given up. These art forms helped to teach me what it meant to be strong, and I hope to do the same with my illustrations and stories.
I mean to inspire others by breathing life into characters who are more than just physically strong. My characters and their stories will show the strength in kindness, forgiveness, sacrifice, and the strength in suffering only to smile. I strive to answer my lingering childhood questions in my own way, and from my own perspective. The universe is not cruel, but balanced. People are cruel, and therefore, have the power to alleviate cruelty in the world. I simply want people to realize how much power they could wield if they only chose to fight.
