The alien phase... It's a long story, and there was a ton of outside influence on my life from 2001 to 2008 (and much of the time since). That aside, I was working as a taxi driver, centered in Huntington Beach, California, most of that time (except for about 7 months living at the Electra Gallery in 2005-06). In 2003, the taxi company took the old radio dispatch system out, and put in a computer dispatch system. That killed the business, basically, and forced every driver to work 7 days a week. We couldn't just work weekends, or when we felt like it, anymore.
It got so bad, that by Thanksgiving 2007, I could no longer make enough money to pay for the taxi each week. Plus I had three bouts of cellulitis that year, a bad leg infection, the first bout nearly killed me. The last E.R. doctor told me that if I kept driving a taxi I was going to die... in weeks or months, not years. So in November 2007, weighing 365 pounds, and barely able to walk due to bad feet, I took to living on the streets of Southern California. I went straight from working 80 to 100 hours a week in the cab, to full on, living on the streets, homelessness.
I literally overworked my way to being a bum. No alcohol. No drugs. No mental illness diagnosis. Just a change in technology that completely changed the taxi industry.
While I was driving the taxi after living in the Electra gallery, I kept a 14" X 17" sketch pad in the cab, and drew two or three sketch pads worth of drawings, mostly little silhouette people with dark backgrounds. I lost all those drawings somewhere along the way. I also did a couple good drawings early on in my scribble style. I drew a picture of come colored glass jars for my mom for Mother's Day in 2006. She still has that professionally framed picture on her wall, and was offered $400 for it once. I also did a big, banner-sized, logo of the play/movie
Rent, for my sister and her kids. They know Anthony Rapp, the guy with the movie camera from OBC and the movie,
Rent. I had dozens of quotes from the movie in the drawing's background, foreshadowing the kind of backgrounds I often do these days. Water got spilled on that, and it got ruined.
I did three alien drawings which I put on skateboard decks that I found by the dumpster of our apartments. The caption on this one reads, "I'm not Crazy! And if you say I am one more time, I'll send my invisible ninja leprechauns after you." Another homeless guy and I were joking around one night in 2008, at a bus stop. He called me crazy, and that response popped in my head. I put these on the decks with Mod Podge, which worked well.
The first scribble style drawing I ever actually sold was an alien guy, like these, in the spring of 2008. I ventured up to Hollywood for a while during my year of homelesssness in California. I set up on the corner of Hollywood and Highland, the big tourist area these days, right on the sidewalk. At the time, there were a whole bunch of people, mostly out-of-work actors, who would dress up like famous people or characters, and make tips taking photos with tourists. It was a weird scene. I set a big cardboard folder of my drawings up on the sidewalk, while "Marilyn Monroe" paced back and forth 15 feet away, waiting to take photos with people from Iowa or wherever.
I had an alien drawing, and it said "Illegal Alien" in big letters, and then the word bubble said, "Green cards? We don't need no stinkin' green cards!" I sold that for $5 that day. Not long after, I saw a guy dressed as Elmo get into a shouting match with a Harley biker guy, the real thing, the biker was a tourist with his wife. They almost went to blows. Hollywood is not what people expect, but it really is a weird place where just about anything can happen. Walking up to sleep in the hills that night, I almost bumped into a guy getting out of a limo SUV. It was Sean "Diddy" Combs. Anything can happen in Hollywood. Seriously, pretty much anything.
Back in the early 1990's, living in a house full of pro BMX racers and industry guys, called the Pros of Westminster (or P.O.W. House), I used to draw with pen and ink, now and then. I drew a bunch of these weird shapes interlocking with each other, like these two. I never considered myself a visual artist, until about a year or two ago, when I'd been selling drawings for over a year straight. I was always just "a guy who drew sometimes." I did a handful of these shapes like this in 2011-2012, I think. They all got lost somewhere along the way, like a lot of other stuff.
It was one of "those days," so that's what I drew.
No comments:
Post a Comment