Origin of a Practice
I've never been shy about my creative origins.

I grew up in Los Angeles during the 90's and at the time, graffiti culture was everywhere. The older kids that I once skateboarded with started tagging crews overnight and I was swept up in the subculture. There were so many layers to the handstyles and tags that I saw on walls throughout the city and I was immediately attracted to the intersection of art and typography. Before I got into graffiti, I drew cartoon characters and dreamed of a career in comics but my interest in that type of work faded fast. There were a wide range of styles emerging but the nearly incomprehensible wildstyle lettering I saw really resonated. That initial fascination opened up a whole new way of seeing things that I still find myself returning to 3 decades later.

This experience was my starting point as a serious artist. In the years since I have come to appreciate the true impact that these years have had on my life as a photographer and an artist, although those practices evolved siloed and seemingly independent of one another.

The reality is that I would have never been inspired to photograph the neighborhoods of Los Angeles in the way that I did if not for my involvement in graffiti culture.

It is also true that if not for the years mastering abstract lettering and other compositional elements, I would lack the creative framework to merge the two practices that I have today. My collage paintings and illustration are the result of the intersection of these mediums and a DIRECT descendent of the endless blackbooks I filled so long ago.

I started out writing this newsletter because I wanted to offer insight into the work that I make. That required a period of deep reflection on my part where I had to think long and hard about what I was doing and what I am trying to accomplish with my work. I think that I gravitate towards abstraction because, like the wildstyle letters I was inspired by, it requires interpretation and a certain amount of contextual awareness to fully appreciate.

What I mean is that it is a type of encoded, experiential memory that, once shared, can be consumed in different ways depending on your personal viewpoint. But it is critical to understand the background in which it was conceived and, in the case of Nonstndrd Creative, that history is unapologetically rooted in hip-hop culture, the streets of Los Angeles, and wildstyle graffiti.

Thanks for reading Secret Schematic, the official newsletter of Nonstndrd Creative Projects. If you stumbled across this and are not a subscriber, I highly recommend you sign up here: https://www.nonstndrd.com/#/portal/signup. As a bonus, it also gets my urban landscape photography newsletter, True Topographics sent direct to you as well. Seems like a great deal to me! Peace and stay safe out there people.