and I felt really stifled in
that environment and I
think it’s great for a lot of
people if your trying to
do magazine illustration
or book illustration, but
that wasn’t what I was
trying to do, or wanted
to do. So I had a brush
with some training, but I
was really just using all
of my own tendencies
to produce what I wanted to anyway.
How old were you
when you got into
painting?
I started with some oils
when I was 10 or 11, I
wasn’t really into oil.
Then later on I was trying to use it, I worked
in every medium until
I arrived at my current.
So I would say around
10 I was really trying to
paint, before that it was
just in school or whatever. But it wasn’t until
the year 2000 that I started experimenting with my current medium, and it was shortly
thereafter that I started using it exclusively and then starting painting with it obsessively.
90
When did you get the thought to go with blood? Where did it come from? The
thought is one thing, but going through it is another.
I started experimenting with blood in the year 2000, in small amounts. At the time I was
really into doing cross-hatched and stippled drawings, that was my technique and I really
loved it because of how precise it was, it was like a razors edge at the tip of a pen. I felt
like I arrived at a place where I was comfortable with the content of the art and it was real
and it was what I wanted it to be, it was communicating what it needed to for me, but the
medium, there was a disconnect. I was still using man-made, man manufactured stuff,
and at the time I was in a weird spot, to say it lightly, and I started experimenting with just
drips of it, and it was there for the first time that I felt like what was going on inside of me,