I refuse to state. Categorically.
Oh. Wait.
When I was born it was in San Jose. When I was little I remember being poor and white and mexican. My favorite things are soup, olive oil, the ocean. I enjoy making things, and challenges. I am the eldest child of three marriages and four children. I have lived in California my whole life, between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Coast of the state. During High School I played sports, surfed, took hard classes, played guitar in the band, helped raise my little brother and sister, and felt ugly lots. Not uncommon.
After graduating from High School I traveled around the Western United States, Hawaii, Central America and Europe in between semesters of attending community colleges in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara. I learned to play jazz guitar and found oil painting. I studied abroad in Spain and then starting dating my art history professor Eva and went back to Santa Barbara and worked at a restaurant and finished my transfer requirements and sold some paintings and went back and spent the following summer in Madrid and learned Guernica. It's important to understand that part in order to understand the artwork I make, is why I tell you.
I finished my Bachelor’s degree in art at UCSC in 2005. It was difficult. Since then I have been a snowboard bum in South Lake Tahoe and a carpenter and an artist living in Oakland, which is what I am right now right now.
I believe in love and the power of the ‘magination and the cruel weight of it all which it is the artist’s job to make float with love and the power of the ‘magination.