BUILD YOURSELF A TOOLKIT

I’m a little long in the tooth now as my gramps would say. Thankfully as I look back on the work I have done, it’s a collection of “wow that was fun” moments. Even the hard ones, the late ones, or the - I can’t believe this is actually happening ones. Looking back. What a blast it all was!

It all started with making things with legos. I fucking love legos. The legos gave me a new tool for my toolkit. I could think of something and physically build it. Visualizing ideas into reality is powerful stuff, I think I became addicted to it.

It’s been a cool journey for me, getting to see ideas come to life professionally many times. Creating an idea and seeing that become real, that can be walked through, immersive, felt, and played with, is an unreal feeling. Kinda like playing with life sized legos.

With each new challenge, there’s always an opportunity to put a new tool in the toolkit. And each project is a learning experience for me to grow as an artist, and creative human.

I think now back on 30 years ago starting to do graffiti as a kid, acting on that idea, painting in sketchy places, having a blast.

I wanted to learn how to use a spray paint can so badly, and it was the hardest thing I ever tried to do. Coming home at 16, trying to wash my hands before my mom could see. I still wonder how I would always get so much paint on me, like did I even get any on the wall?

I was competitive kid, always playing sports my whole life. So graffiti was a new kind of sport to me. I really thought the kids in school who were graffiti and breakdancing were the coolest kids, so I just tried to hang out with them as much as I could. And we would compete in our black books, trying to do burners. Pretty soon we were sneaking out to paint whatever we could find.

In Miramar, Florida, there was an abandoned factory called the Agripost. It was full of graffiti and huge! So many amazing pieces from writers and crews I really looked up to. I remember meeting so many people that were coming to paint there. It was super sketchy and definitely not legal. But it was the only place we could go try to do pieces and learn to paint.

Some of the photos here are me at 16. Taken by Disko. Who taught me a lot about art and graffiti. Even gave my my name, Level 3. Because spray paint is a Level 3 aerosol.

I remember how much I wanted to learn how to do 3d style graffiti. Graffiti magazines had images from Germany from artists like Daim, Delta, Loomit. I was so inspired by artists like Ces and Per from FX cru in NY. Artists on the west coast as well, Mear, Slick, Chaz. All I wanted to do was graffiti, to learn how to use a spray can and emulate all of these amazing artists I was being exposed to.

After graduation, I knew I wanted to do art. But graffiti was not a career, at least not back then. I figured I would just learn how to use the computer, and turns out that meant going to school for graphic design.

THE COLLEGE YEARS

So my parents are teachers, and going to college was a fact for me. I even had to make sure I paid for it because they couldn’t afford to send me. But its cool, I figured it out. And honestly some of the greatest years of my life. By day I was a decent student of graphic design, by night I did graffiti. At this point I had actually learned to paint pretty well and was in a few crews from Miami. DME FUKQ!

School was great, but I really loved doing graffiti, in fact I even was painting jobs for clubs and restaurants in Gainesville, FL where I went to school. I look back fondly on those days, painting freights in the dark, pulling all nighters in class, and really doing college right. I had some great teachers who I credit to this day, as the inspiration behind the way I work, think, and grow as an artist and designer.

Majoring in Graphic Design was a good choice for me. I really love lettering, colors, composition. My art classes were helping my graffiti and vice versa. I really tried to use spray paint in any class I could.

I learned how to make stencils, stickers, and how to design ideas on the computer was integral for my toolkit. Which was growing exponentially these days, I was like a sponge, soaking it all in.

A truly historic moment in college was in my experimental painting class. Our teacher Dan Stepp, said we can paint on anything we want as long as it’s not a white canvas. A lightbulb went off, “I’ve got so many spray cans, I can cut them up and make a canvas out of them!”

CANLOVE was born. Ever since I made my first “CanScape” using recycled cans, I haven’t stopped. The 20 years since then, with help from Paul Ramirez, we have recycled many thousands of empty cans, turning them into works of art all over the globe.

I am truly grateful to have spent the years of my youth doing graffiti, exploring boundless creativity and adding more and more skills to my toolkit for the future.

STARTING MY CAREER