The life I live is my art work.
I like to work really hard and then earn the good life. I actually enjoy it. If you're eating caviar all the time, it doesn't taste good anymore.
When I was first painting the Monopoly guy I received a criticism. People said, "You're just painting cartoon characters, anyone can do that," but I'm actually a very skilled artist. That's why I released a Jack Nicholson portrait right after that that was very detailed in the face to show my skills.
My mom is a painter, so I've been doing drawings and paintings as early as I can remember. Then there was this gap where I was doing graffiti in high school and making as much [traditional] art.
Graffiti is a lot easier than the canvas actually, because it's such a large format, so when you're going to such a thin detail, it's not that thin in the realm of things because it's such a big wall. This would take a small paint brush of detail, but on a huge wall, if that's the size of a building, the thinnest detail is still that big, it's a quick spray. Spray paint is easiest for me. I love spray paint.
I spent maybe a week all day every day working on the wall, my first legal wall because I was just so excited and it was nice to be able to chill and relax and work on the piece instead of doing it quickly and running from the cops or whatever. Then it just really grew from there. Other people saw it and appreciated the skill.
I learned to paint at home from my mom. She was a very good teacher, but with spray paint, I taught myself. Spray paint is impossible. They say it takes a decade to really learn spray paint and be good with it. I've been at it about ten years now and am now really just getting good and confident with it.
I had just been doing graffiti around New York and this real estate investor guy had walked through meat packing in New York and saw some of my graffiti. He was impressed and asked if I sold canvases. I really had not made any canvases of my graffiti work yet, but told him I could make one for him. He then commissioned me to make ten paintings and put on my first art show. Between the sold out show and the cops chasing after me it created a lot of media and I've been doing really well since then.
I always try to find time to do some graffiti here and there, but most of the time, I have so many walls that are given to me now, so anytime I want to go out and do something illegal, I can just do it legally.
I did an art show for Donald Trump at his house in Palm Beach, Florida. It was a bunch of pop art and stuff like that, so I wasn't doing any graffiti at that time, so I'd say from about 2000 to 2006, I wasn't doing any graffiti.
