[Music]
I came down to California to meet the guy I was doing snowboards with,
and I remember coming to the door of his house in LA. He laughed. He was like, I thought
you were a man—cuz I was like 21 years old or something? A friend of mine became
a pro snowboarder. They asked me to do their entire line. And I knew, okay if I'm
doing this now, what am I gonna do in 20 years? Cuz I'm already doing this stuff. I
have to do things I don't know how to do. And then at CalArts,
I sort of like, stopped doing everything that I was good at—drawing, image making,
and I just made work that was focusing on how am I thinking? What can I do to
make it clear? I had a mission. I wanted to stay in Los Angeles.
I bought a computer, just a computer on a board. That was it, I was like I'm never
having a job again.
The fact that most people don’t understand what graphic
design means, has that helped you? Yes. Because if you decide to like, define
something for yourself, it helps if other people don't already have a definition
for it. I understood early on that by calling
myself that I can do whatever I want. Then I was like, wait I can direct
commercials. I can do animation. I can create installations in museums. I can
have shows, and I can do all these things. The larger project—it was more about
self-discovery—choices I've made in my life. I was tired of this design process
where you produce like 30 things. Someone else decides for you that that's the one
you keep. To step away from that and have more authorship in what I was making. It
felt like a challenge. Okay, now I'm gonna just pursue these things I wanted to
make. Having that mindset, that was like a major gravitational force
like that everything changed. I set that up a long time ago.
I closed off avenues where I saw like, okay even if I'm really successful at
this, I'm not gonna be happy, so I'm not gonna do that. I think it's like a
project to challenge the idea of what being a designer is, but also pursuing
art in all seriousness. Putting like, basically all my energy into that. The paintings in
that way are sort of like a revelation, that like everything I do will be based
on those paintings. Now when I'm doing design projects, it almost feels like I'm
licensing my own work. My daughter, like I was at her birthday party, this happens all
the time, I'd meet a dad and he's like so, what do you do? And I’m like, I’m an artist? [laughs]
And my eyes are like [points up] I’m an artist? He looks at me like, oh yeah? And he’s like.
Yeah and I do like projects and design too. He’s like, oh yeah so what do you design? I'm like, um.
Ah, like, like stuff for like Nike. And I'm saying, I'm just like, I, it just seemed like,
dude. It sounds like you're making it up. [Music]