Popeye
Drawn at age four
Trying to fit my life into a bite sized biography is hard with each step of my life being a unique chapter. I have decided to present a web version of my story that speaks more towards what helped create me. In the past the biographies s my former dealers or galleries presented seem to want to play up the poverty and suffering in my life which really doesn't represent me.
My life is about overcoming problems rather than to allow them to define me. I’ve always felt challenges should teach us strength and resilience. Maybe there is a misplaced idea that suffering sales art. However if I do lop off part of my ear, I’ll sure to include it in the next version of my biography!
Trying to fit my life into a bite sized biography is hard with each step being a unique chapter. I have decided to present a web version of my, of what helped create me.
In the past my former dealers or galleries seem to want to play up the poverty and suffering in my life which really doesn't represent me. My life is about overcoming problems rather than to allow them to define me. I’ve always felt challenges should teach us strength and resilience. Maybe there is a misplaced idea that suffering sales art. However if I do lop off part of my ear, I’ll sure to include it in the next version of my biography!
here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
Writing about my life isn't easy, especially if one wishes to make reading bite sized rather than the full experience. Each step of my life is a unique story, but I think writing what made me who I am will serve best for online purposes. In the past my former dealers or galleries seem to want to play up the poverty and suffering in my life which really doesn't represent me. I overcame problems rather than to allow them to define me. I’ve always felt challenges should teach us strength and resilience. Maybe there is a misplaced idea that suffering sales art.
I was born in West Germany to young American parents in 1974. I was out of my home at age 15, making my own direction. I would end up opening my first art studio at age 17. My life was not one of privilege, in fact it was one of abject poverty, one in which my mother's relationships with men defined. We moved around a great deal, it was not uncommon for me to go to many schools in one year. The relationships between my mother and her men were often abusive ones that took a toll on me especially, as the eldest child. I suppose I grew up to think that we just get on with it, but in truth many of us have issues throughout lives because of childhood traumas and irregular behaviours by those we most trust to care for us.
In truth when my own child reached age 15 the full ramifications of my experiences hit me and I wondered how I felt so ready for the world when my own child was still very child like.
I think in part it is because I found another family through friendships in the underground scene of the 1980's. I even got to know a then not famous Kurt Cobain at age 13. The scene became my life, and my friends became my family. It is odd because there were many people in my life who pushed aside this group of friends as being queer, faggots, odd, druggies, and the whole lot of negative things. Being the baby of the scene, I got looked after by the queens and the fruit flies. And because I was rough and scrappy, I inturned looked after them. Often stepping between a friend and a hostile bigot. But that didn't keep violence finding our group when they were on their own. A group of gay bashers beat up some of our friends, one queen lost his eye.
People have long praised Washington State for various positives, but that was not the Washington State I knew. And even when Nirvana exploded on the world stage, the people of Washington State acted like years of violence, hatred, and making our lives hard was forgiven because "they simply didn't get it."
Watching the scene I love become destroyed by MTV, record companies, and kids who never had a context to what their newly adopted life meant,