I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.
I started painting when I was in high school.
I never studied art, but taught myself to draw by imitating the New Yorker cartoonists of that day, instead of doing my homework.
I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
I'm a tattoo artist, and I went to school to paint, and I started writing and getting published.
Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
I'm a classically trained painter, and I was an illustrator in New York working with Fortune 500s companies as well as the NBA and the Olympics. I first got into sculpting when I created a sculpture based on a painting I had done for the 1984 Olympics.
I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there.
I wasn't trying to turn graffiti into an art form. I just wanted to learn about art. I wanted to learn this game.
I'm a painter. I was a graffiti artist, and I painted all over the world.