You liken your work to a journalist enterprise, and you free write every day. Do you think that you’d ever do a written piece, or something outside of your typical art form? The text pieces, which is the freewriting that I do—it’s all on 8x11 sheets of paper. There are thousands of them. They’ve actually been a really cool concept. Freewriting was always the equivalent, to me, of getting through a thousand different ideas . . . I started showing them with my gallery primarily in Miami, and we started selling sheets of paper with things written on them. I sold one that said, “I’ll see it when I believe it.” It later became a mural in Miami, and did really well. It’s about manifesting your own dreams . . . Some of the text pieces are really stupid, and some are emotional—a lot of them are vulgar, and a lot of them are straight out of the mouth. Ah, man. I just fucked that fucking shit up! A lot of them, when I am going in and out of relationships, will be about girls and raw emotions. I think what you get from freewriting is the rawness of it, which I like. I just got to co-write this TV pilot, which was really, really cool. It’s with my writing partner, Harrison James. It was really fun to write. I don’t know if I could do a book, but the pilot was fun—coming up with dialogue and stories . . . I would leave my art studio, go there to write, and it was like going to soccer practice. It’s been really cool. Why L.A.? Why art and graffiti here? I feel extremely fortunate to have traveled a lot with my family. My dad was in the military, and we got to live in Korea and across the U.S., mostly living in Northern California. I went to college in San Diego, and at that point we had started a nightclub—me and two partners—we were 18, and I am 48 now, so that was [around] 1989. After graduating, it was natural to move to L.A. to keep that business going. Also, I felt like I had gotten stuck in this sand trap in San Diego, and had done everything I could do . . . I’ve been [in L.A.] 25 years now, and I’ve seen it grow. L.A. is fucking cool. What is your relationship to cannabis? How do you use it in your creative endeavors? Growing up in NorCal, weed was always around. When I was super young, in Grass Valley and Chico, in the mountains—it wasn’t talked about. But it was clear that it was around. As it’s been getting more and more popular, the legal and the illegal are starting to even out a little bit . . . It will be legal here in January 2018—relatively soon—and I think it is what it is. I think it’s a good thing. It’s funny, too, ‘cause I know a lot of L.A. people that would never have anything to do with marijuana, and now they want someone to pick them up oil or a CBD product. Or they need a product for their dog. It’s truly weird, because I feel like I always grew up around pot . . . I do think it makes you more creative. Who knows, I come to work every day whether I am stoned or not. I was a heavier user earlier on in my career, when I was younger. Now I appreciate the days that I get to do it a little bit more.
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