This is my favorite selfie, from February of 2020. The bear logo was on a construction truck I was walking by. My nickname, "The White Bear," came from a poem I wrote, after getting dumped by a girlfriend in 1988. I published it in a poetry zine in 1992. My roommate at the time kept calling me "The White Bear" after reading the zine, and the name stuck. It IS NOT a racist thing. White supremacy is a complete crock of shit, and I want nothing to do with it. Cool people come from all kinds of backgrounds, and so do assholes. Race, religion, nationality and all that have little to do with it. It's just an old nickname that stuck, and was better than Empig, my nickname throughout my grade school years.
If' you're reading this blog post, you've probably just seen one of the NFT's I put out, and are wondering who I am. Most of the people who have read this blog since 2017 are from the Old School BMX freestyle world of the 1980's or 1990's. That's where I come from. Here are the basics about me.
If you want to know about my early life, this post tells you the basics:
If you want to see my history as a creative person, check out this blog post:
Who the heck is Steve Emig- my creative work
I'm 55 years old, homeless, and now living on the East end of the San Fernando Valley, just over the hill from Hollywood, California. I landed back here in Southern California 2019, and was selling my Sharpie art (or trying to) on Hollywood Boulevard, until Covid hit in early 2020. I was in North Carolina, and then Richmond, Virginia, for nearly 10 years, late 2008-2019.
I grew up in Ohio as a kid, lived in Carlsbad, New Mexico for a year (1980-81), then went to high school in Boise, Idaho (1982-84). I lived in San Jose, California for a year (1985-86), before getting a jobBMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, at age 20, in Torrance. I lived in SoCal from 1986-2008, most of the time in and around Huntington Beach.
Since I'm homeless now, I have to say that I don't take any drugs, prescription or recreational, and I don't drink any alcohol at this point. I've been struggling in and out of homelessness since I started working as a taxi driver in late 1999. I quit the taxi business when it was dying in 2007, though I worked again driving a cab in North Carolina (where my family now lives) in 2011-12, until my dad had a stroke.
I'm weird and creative enough naturally, I don't need alcohol or drugs. I'm 100% pro legalization for weed, OK, now it's called cannabis. I was a social drinker until a couple years into my taxi driving career, in the mid- 2000's. I worked 7 days a week, and couldn't drink, while driving 12-18 hours a day. I drove drunk people home in the cab every single night. I just got sick of alcohol, and drunk people, and stopped drinking. I don't care if you do, I just stopped. It doesn't help me, and I feel like shit the day after any drinking even a few beers, so I quit.
At this point, I'm primarily known as a blogger and Sharpie artist that came out of the Old School BMX freestyle world of the 1980's. I invented a style of drawing with Sharpie markers that I call Sharpie Scribble Style. I came up with this technique while actually living in an indie art gallery in Anaheim, called AAA Electra 99, in 2005-6. Here's one of my better pieces, that was used as an art show flyer in 2017.
This Kurt Cobain drawing appeared in the one, small, solo art show I did. That was at Earshot Music, a really cool, old school music shop, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I was living at the time. The show was in early November of 2017.
Since getting serious with this style of drawing, in November of 2015, I've sold around 90 originals, and 120 or so "prints," which were actually high quality color copies. With help from friends in Scandinavia and Europe/U.K., my work has made it to 6 of the 7 continents. I need to find an art collector in Antarctica, and on the International Space Station, to be truly global. Those aren't my priorities right now, but I'll get there someday.
When taxi driving died in 2007, due to the new technology of computer dispatching, I wound up fully living on the streets for a year. I literally went from working 80-100 hours one week to homeless the next.
In November 2008, I accepted my family's offer to fly me to North Carolina, where they wound up living years after I moved out. I got stuck in NC for ten years. Other than taxi driving, I could not find ANY "real job" there, and lived with my parents, or in homeless shelters, most of the time. I started selling my Sharpie drawings just to have a little income, not knowing if anyone would actually buy them. It turns out, they do sell, but not for enough money to actually make a living.
These 18" X 24" Sharpie Scribble Style drawings, (like the one above) take 40-45 hours each to draw, I work from photos, and I've sold the last 40 or so drawings for $150 to $200, for the originals. My prints usually go for $20, though they have sold for more in Scandinavia and Europe.
When I'm bored, (which isn't often, I usually work 7 days a week at blogging and art), I do black and white Sharpie "doodle" drawings. These are just for fun, I've never sold any, and often have some words or message in them. I've drawn over 100 of these. I consider these just goofing around, and draw them when my brain is tired from doing other things.
My blogging started in 2008, when I landed in my parents' small apartment, in tiny Kernersville, North Carolina. Bored out of my skull, and unable to find a job as the Great Recession economic collapse happened, I started "surfing the web" on my parents' computer, as we used to call it. In a couple of weeks, I started blogging about my days as a mediocre BMX freestyler, and BMX/skateboard industry guy, in the 1980's and 1990's. I'm really a writer at heart, and I had already published more than 40 zines in my life, so blogging was a natural for me. I was a Luddite until 2008, just getting online to check email or do a Google search now and then. Since 2008, I've tried over 25 different blog ideas, written over 2,400 total blog posts, and raked in over 440,000 page views across all of my blogs. Here's a post that goes into more detail about that.
I've been homeless nearly the whole time since June 2017. Three times I had a room for a couple of months each time, thanks to friends and Covid gig worker unemployment. Living with my mom in NC was a toxic situation, and I just had to leave in 2017. I've scraped by as a Sharpie artist since, surviving as a homeless, but working, artist. A bunch of people, mostly from the BMX world, have helped me along the way at different points.
Homelessness is a hard thing to get out of, particularly when you are simply trying to work your way out of it, solo, like I am. I literally work, as much as possible, all day, every day, either blogging, promoting and building my social media presence (Google #sharpiescribblestyle), and just doing what I have to in order to survive day to day. That means panhandling when I run out of art money. I have done a ridiculous amount of creative work while homeless, and my main goal is to just get to where I can make a decent living, and rent a basic, one bedroom apartment, from my creative work.
Why don't I have a "real job?" Simple answer is that between being really overweight now, and not having a job history anymore, there's no "real job" I could get that would pay enough for me to rent a place to live. I worked 35 hours a week at a restaurant in 2002-3, while homeless, and it took me 9 months to save up $300 to get a new taxi permit, so I could go back to driving a cab. Working minimum wage while homeless just makes the homelessness permanent, unless someone will give you a room for free for several months. AND it's just miserable. Most people don't realize that pretty much every homeless program relies on the homeless person NOT working a job, to get EBT (food stamps) and housing. If you make more than about $300 working, you get kicked off of all aid. Really. The people that go through homeless programs usually wind up scamming Social Security Disability, and getting housing, medical, and food, paid for by your tax dollars, forever. There are probably 6-10 million people living this way right now. For real.
One other thing I've been doing since 2019 is shooting photos on the streets. An old BMX friend, Steve Crandall, gave me his old iPhone 5, and that's been my camera for two years now. So I have this big collection of photos of the weird stuff you see as a homeless person, which I'm beginning to publish under the hashtag #SEstreetlife. I'll start blogging about this project soon. Here's one pic.
If you got down to this point in the post, you probably just heard of me, and are wondering if my weird NFT's are worth paying for. I can't answer that, you'll have to figure that one out for yourself. But There are over 700 blog posts in this blog alone, that may help, and probably another 500 posts I've written elsewhere online (see the "Addicted to blogs" link above). I deleted about 1,200 blog posts in 2012, everything I'd written online, when I got depressed, after my dad died.
I heard about NFT's a few months ago, in an article about a musician, and recently started digging in and researching the subject. The more research I do, the more I realize that this technology is going to be around a long time, and that right now is a moment that only comes once for a movement like this. So I'm going to be creating NFT's, of photos, Sharpie art, and maybe other things, for a long time to come.
Does that mean you can make a quick 10X or 20X flip on them? I don't know, that's for you to figure out. I'll be putting most of my work out pretty cheap, by NFT standards, under $200+ gas fees in most cases. And I'll throw a few NFT's out super cheap now and then. The first couple I put out at a high price, and a few of the more prominent future NFT's will cost more as well. I have a 35 year track record of all kinds of creative work, and I really need to get my fat, ugly ass into an apartment. So I hope you make a killing flipping my NFT's so I can keep creating cool shit. I also cuss too much for some people. If that bothers you, don't buy my stuff, there's more than enough other NFT's out there to check out.
I'm on Twitter: @steveemig43 , and I have an Intagram account: @steveemig43, but don't really use it anymore. I LOVE Pinterest, and I'm there at Steve Emig. Here's my Pinterest page. I have tons of boards, including 170+ photos of my #sharpiescribblestyle art, and the new #SEstreetlife photo board, and a bunch more. I'm learning the NFT world with my photos, Sharpie art will enter the mix sometime later. I also have a bunch of old BMX IP I own, but I won't do anything with that until talking to the riders involved. First I need to get a place to live, and stabilize my life, and learn the NFT world. I haven't joined Discord yet, mostly because I'm one guy, I have limited time online until I get an apartment, and I just don't have time for it, yet.
As a BMX and skateboard industry guy in the 1980's and 1990's, I saw a lot of really cool stuff happen in person. This clip below is footage I shot in the spring of 1989, at a 2-Hip King of Vert contest in Canada. You may recognize the rider at 14:43 in the clip, where he pulls a new trick for the first time ever.
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