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| Jeremy Biggers |
It was the late 90s, Jeremy was the fresh teen from Arts Magnet [BTWHSPVA] who came to Corporate America with an exceptional work ethic, meticulous eye for detail and climbed the ranks faster than most adults. If you needed something done, and done right, Jeremy was your man. It is not surprising to me in his professional artistic life he has achieved what many others only hope to achieve. That same work ethic and meticulous eye he honed while a teenager has proven to be the necessary edge needed to sustain and remain relevant in the competitive world of art, photography and fashion.
Jeremy’s keen eye keeps you laced in the latest UNKO fashions whether it is a t-shirt, custom designed kicks, or one of a kind painted fitted with images from Art History to Jay-Z. His photography ranges from women in Sari highlighting the beautifully simplistic nature of the eyes to the sensuously provocative nature of a woman’s body in its most natural form. Whether creating with a pencil, paintbrush or mouse, his artwork captures the thoughts and images of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Jeremy is relevant. Indisputably relevant.
Who are you?
“Who am I? Jeremy Biggers… artist… photographer… painter… superhero… I guess if I had to sum it up in a nutshell, yeah, that’s what I would say.”
Why superhero?
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| Superhero |
“Because I do a lot of different stuff. I have a work ethic that a lot of other people I know [don’t have], my colleagues or my peers. They always call me a robot because they’re like ‘Man, this dude never stops! He never sleeps! He’s never NOT working on something!’ Even on days when I’m off and I’m not working or anything, even my fun side projects are STILL doing a painting for myself or going out and shooting this photography for myself. I’m never NOT working. Because they see so much stuff coming from me they’re like ‘Man, you work the same amount of hours I work every week, how are you able to be this productive with this much artwork?’ I’m not going to say I’m PROLIFIC because I’m not prolific YET but…”
Not yet…
“Yeah, not yet… if I didn’t have a day job I probably would be. But just the in between [actually] doing the stuff for me, the client work, the clothing line that I co-own, the photography studio, the wedding company… Between all that, the people on the outside looking in think ‘Dude, how do you keep all that stuff going?’ It’s very difficult and at times, yeah, it wears on me because I’m not getting any younger. Like now, this weekend was CRAZY. This past weekend was non-stop going… working on this project… working on this project… leaving this project to go work on this project… so roll up this morning like ‘Yeah, I’m might not go to work tomorrow.’ I ended up going but I’m paying for it right now. When I get home, I’m crashing.”
I understand. You have a lot of stuff [on your plate]… What was your initial passion?
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| Early Stages |
“My initial passion was drawing. Even as a kid I remember the first time I ever drew anything and got any feedback that was positive - I was in the first grade. Our teacher gave us a homework assignment; she cut the last strip of a comic strip, and said ‘What do you think is going to happen next in this comic strip? Draw it. That’s your homework.’ Everybody else was complaining about it, I thought ‘Well, I’ve never drawn anything but how hard can this be?’
I ended up doing it and I guess it looked enough like I had potential that everybody was really like ‘Oh, you see this?’ My parents were showing it to other people. Once I started doing that then it got to a point where I thought ‘Well, shoot, if I can get feedback every time then I have to get better and better so I can keep getting that feedback. Keep feeding off that initial feeling.’ So I would say that drawing would be the initial.
After I got to high school and realized pencil just took way too long I started painting. I was terrible, extremely terrible. I kept working with it. I had some really good teachers at Booker T. Washington [the Arts School] that pretty much told me ‘Ay man, you can do this! There’s other people that exists in this world that have done this, so it’s not impossible.’
Pretty much, I’m really competitive so I don’t like losing at anything, no matter what it is. I don’t care if I’m playing wheelchair basketball against some… I don’t care what it is, I am trying to win… PERIOD. So it was very competitive.
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| Painter |
When I got to college, I honed my craft a little bit. I started focusing just on paintings. Then once I realized doing photography is a lot easier or quicker than the painting [I can get the same type image] because a lot of stuff that I would be painting, I would do portraits of people and try to get them as photorealistic as possible. Once I realized ‘Well, shoot, I’m spending 80 hours doing this painting, I can click one button’ and have this same exact image. I decided ‘Yeah, I think I’m just going to go more toward the photography side.’ Because I can do a lot more work just pushing one button versus sitting at a canvas for however many hours.
Now it’s that balance between the painting. If I do photography for too long, then I start thinking ‘Man, I haven’t done a painting in a while and I miss painting.’ I go paint and then I get addicted to painting again so I’ll paint. Then I’ll say ‘Aw man, I haven’t taken any pictures in a while.’ I keep going back and forth between the painting and the photography.”
So those are the two primaries [painting and photography].
“Yeah, those are definitely the two - now.”
I did see your series a while ago the ‘Street Dwellers’; what led you to do that?
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| Street Dweller |
“Anytime I have art shows, I never like showing the same artwork in multiple shows in a row. Anytime I have a new art show I try to do all new work so when people come in… It’s the same thing like if you see a standup comedian, you’ve seen his stuff once you’re not going to laugh as hard the next time you see him cause you’re like ‘Man, he’s always telling the same jokes every city he goes to or every standup special he has.’ I approach my artwork or paintings the same way. ‘What do I want to say or what message am I trying to portray in this work?’
With the Street Dwellers series, I really wanted to show that [it was right around the time the economy was getting really bad] people were a missed paycheck or two away from being homeless themselves. I took people we passed every single day that are seemingly insignificant to us and wanted to show them in a bigger, larger than life perspective. I took some really large photos, 4’x5’, 4’x6’, as well as paintings that are about the same size. So you couldn’t ignore it. It was so stark. The body of work [the way they were displayed in the gallery] you couldn’t pass it up. You had to pay attention to it. That is what I wanted to display.
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| Patriot |
When I was doing it, I talked to every single one of the homeless people I was shooting or painting and got their story of how they became homeless. What I wanted to do ultimately was to create a book as the image and then their story of how they became homeless. A lot of people would think they made bad decisions [or they did this…] but a lot of it wasn’t even that. It was they went off to war, they came back and couldn’t really get any financial support from a country that they pretty much lost limbs for or whatever else. Or any number of situations where they had bad business deals go through or anything. A lot of homeless people they’re just too proud to go back. Some of them are homeless by choice. Some of them are homeless by circumstance.
I learned a lot of that because I was actually having conversations. I wasn’t just running up on some homeless people, shooting them real quick and then running out. I sat there and talked to them for a little while to get their feedback and their story because a lot of them just want someone to talk to and I learned a lot - that it wasn’t necessarily them versus us - but they are a part of society as much as people try to shun them and push them away. I really wanted to show them in a different light, show them in a larger than life scale so people could go ‘Yo, okay, I have to see this! I have to pay attention to this!’”
I know I was impressed. I saw it and was just blown away. I did not see it in the gallery; saw the photos and they just blew me away. It was amazing!
Now, how did the clothing company come about? Where did that come from?
“I always liked fashion but I couldn’t really afford to be fashionable. I was always thinking ‘Yo, I’m going to make my own clothes’ because I know a lot of stuff I like not everybody else will necessarily like. I would start off with little iron ons, t-shirt iron ons or whatever else, or painting the shirts or what not. I did that and I did probably three or four attempts at trying to get a clothing line off the ground and all of them failed miserably. It was painfully miserable!
It was a few years after I left UTA, might have been a year or two after I left UTA, I had a mutual friend introduce me to somebody who was pretty much doing the same thing but his work was a lot better than mine was at that stage. He was taking little camera phone pictures of them and posting them on Facebook and everything. I told him ‘The work was good but people are going to be distracted by how bad the photos are. Let me just take a few of your shots, a few of the items you have, your merchandise, let me shoot those for you - for free.’ I’m not going to charge anything just because it’s like a mentor. That is really big for me because I had people help me along the way so I always wanted to give back to the younger artists.
We’re talking back and forth and I’m telling him about how terrible my attempts at fashion were so he can avoid some of the pitfalls I had. From there we did another shoot. Then we did another shoot and then after we did probably the fourth shoot he pretty much said ‘Dude, you have some really good ideas. What do you think about us adding you to our team permanently?’ [to the clothing line they had]. I was like ‘Yeah, I’m cool with that because I got some designs I’ve been wanting to make on some shirts. So, yeah, let’s do it!’
It was a growing experience [you know] I helped mentor them up with the little bit of knowledge I had and we pretty much went from there. Once he realized I was a bigger asset then just a photographer or just designer, they made me co-owner. Now it’s me and him who own [Unkommon Kolor]. Since then we have gotten quite a bit of notoriety. We’re pretty well known in the area but we’ve also been selling nationwide as well as overseas.
We’re clearly not rich but we’re at a point where people know who we are. Which is good because a lot of clothing lines [when we started it]… anybody can pick up a pen, a pencil, anybody pick up a mouse and drag some pictures off the internet and make a t-shirt. Or throw it in Photoshop, throw a cool little filter on it and make a t-shirt. But our whole thing was we were both artists so we wanted to display that artists can make clothes for other artists that would be kind of like ‘Oh okay, not everybody can do this.’ That’s what we really wanted to focus on – is the art side.
We did a number of t-shirts that went over pretty well. But what got us the most popularity was we started making YouTube videos. We ended up being snowed in one weekend and we were working on our next line, our first official line. Since we got snowed in, it was ‘Well, what do we do?’ So we pretty much just got on a webcam and made a little impromptu show to tell people ‘this is what we got done today.’ It’s called ‘Get Shit Done Mondays’ because it was a Monday and everybody hates Mondays. We decided ‘Yo, we are going to do as much work as we possibly can today since we’re snowed in so that we can hit it hard Tuesday.’ We put that out there and it got such crazy feedback after we did the first one. Everybody was like ‘I can’t wait to see what you’re going to do next Monday.’ It went on for six months, every Monday we had something new. That kept us fresh. We had to keep producing stuff because people were looking for the videos.
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| UNKO T's |
I think along with that fact [and] we were doing art, we were showing the behind the scenes of what it takes to make t-shirts or just us at the screen printing shop. Everybody wears t-shirts, wears fashion stuff but you don’t really get to see the behind the scenes of how it’s made. We were really big on showing our consumers, showing our fan base, how stuff was made to get to that final product and a lot of people were really receptive. Because that happened, we got even more popular than we had been with just the few little t-shirts we were selling. Plus, we had no knowledge of how to ship this stuff and everything. When we got kind of big, we were like ‘Dude, we can save money on shipping’ because we didn’t know we needed to charge people for shipping. We are loosing money on shirts because we are not charging people for shipping. We decided ‘Dude, let’s just go deliver these shirts ourselves.’ Because they are right here Denton or they are right here in Dallas, let’s just go hand deliver this. We got a little popular for doing that too because people were saying ‘Yo, I ordered my shirt at 11 PM and they came and hand delivered it at 2 AM.’ We would drive to people and hand them their shirts and talk to them, and thank them face-to-face for helping us out and give them shirts.
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| UNKO Series 5 |
I think that, coupled with the videos, coupled with the artwork, made us really popular in the college crowd in Dallas, Denton, Arlington area and from there it just clearly spiraled out because so many people know so many other people. Now we’re getting sales like France, Italy, London, and some other places that I’m just like ‘Dude, when we were sitting your dorm room, doing these shirts, designing this stuff, there is no way I thought somebody in France, somebody in London would be wearing these things!’ It’s cool, just to know that somebody I’ve never met and will probably never meet is wearing something I spent hours working on. ‘Okay, that’s cool!’ It kind of fed back into what I was saying about that feedback from people seeing your artwork. Still to this day I’m that guy because I’m like ‘Cool, somebody wants to wear something I did.’’’
That is really cool! I would say one of my favorite items is the baseball cap; my absolute favorite is Jay-Z - The Black Album ‘What More Can I Say’ Fitted. I love that!
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| Jay-Z Fitted |
“Oh yeah! Of course! That started along with the ‘Get Shit Done Mondays’. It started because we went to MAGIC in Vegas, which is like the trade show of all fashions. It really grew us so we could see that THIS is what we’re doing… we’re just playing it by ear, we’re doing whatever we think should work. Then we saw people on a national stage and an international stage, how they were doing it, so we were like ‘This is how you do it the RIGHT way!’ We saw that there are so many clothing lines. So many other people that are doing this [trying to live there dreams] how can we differentiate ourselves from them?
We are artists. What can we do to show people that we paint? What can we do to show people? We were carrying around pictures in our phone. We were showing people, a few people were impressed and they were like ‘Oh, that’s cool!’ But seeing a picture of a painting versus seeing a painting in person is not the same. What can we carry around that wouldn’t make us look like utterly ridiculous fools? We couldn’t just carry around these canvasses under our arms and just look ridiculous.
What can we do that we wear all the time other than t-shirts? Cause t-shirts can kind of get expensive especially if you only want to make one of them right. A lot of people were just screen printing theirs, have minimum orders and you would have to order so many of them. We want each to be really exclusive. We just want to do one of them. What can we do? We wear hats everyday, what if we painted on the bill of the hat. It’s rigid enough, it’s the same material as a canvas so let’s just paint on the hats. Are we going to paint on the bottom or paint on the top, where are we going to paint?
Nobody has every done anything with the under bill and that’s quite a bit of real estate. Everybody always puts stuff on the top of the hat; they always put even the embroidery things, embroidered on the top of the hat. In order to be consistent, I’ve never seen anybody put anything on the bottom of a bill. We started doing that and the way we will keep it exclusive is we’ll have to charge a premium because we have to put in so many hours but we won’t ever reproduce the same thing. Once it’s done once, that’s the only one in existence.
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| Hermes Jeremy Scott Wings Adidas |
Because a lot of the big things in fashion [and street wear specifically] is you don’t want to walk into an event and see somebody wearing the same thing you have. Because we hate that, we don’t want to do anyone else like that. And because it’s hand painted, we didn’t want to get to a point where somebody was like ‘Well that one looks better than this one’ even though it’s the same image. If we only paint it once, we don’t have to worry about people having the same image. And people, again, were real receptive of that cause they were saying ‘Shoot, I’ll pay that much for it if I know I am the only person with it.’ So yeah, we kept doing the hats and they got real popular as well.
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| Unkommon Kolor |
Probably the most popular one we did was… one of our friends was a super huge Lady Gaga fan; we painted Lady Gaga on one of his hats. He went to the concert and threw it on stage. She ended up performing the rest of her concert… she saw the hat and was like ‘Oh My God, it’s amazing!’ She ended up performing the rest of the concert in that hat. That’s crazy! Lady Gaga is a pretty huge star so to have her co-sign us indirectly is like maybe this is a big deal, maybe it’s a big deal now. We’ve had other people wear it too. It’s really cool just to see people that are well off, who are rich, that could buy anything they want still feeling the stuff we’re making or we are producing. So okay, we are doing something right. If they can buy anything they want and they want this… Oh, a’ight cool, I can deal with that.”
I know you are doing a lot of modeling photography, I have seen a lot of your work. You were saying earlier about capturing the image but where did that come from? I know it is still photography but…
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| Simplicity |
“I am a guy, so I like beauty, PERIOD. I am an artist and a guy so I appreciate beauty. I thought, I’m going to start shooting these chicks cause [you know] everybody now a days thinks they’re a model. Every female thinks she’s a model, every dude thinks he’s a rapper. Let me capitalize on that and start taking pictures.
Then it got to a point where I tried to get into the model / photography realm. But after being in it for about six to eight months, I realized that was NOT what I wanted to do because so many times when you take pictures there was like a beauty standard that a lot of other magazines, a lot of other publications wanted you to have, they wanted you to maintain. They would have me pretty much recreate somebody’s face in order to make them more beautiful. Quote, unquote, beautiful. Spread the eyes out more, make the eyes smaller, thin the nose, bring in the shape, sculpt the cheeks, bring in the jawline. Things like that and I was just like, man, at that point, that’s not the same person. You are having me create someone else.
I really don’t want to subscribe to… I really don’t want to be contributing to that whole concept of this is what beautiful is or this is what beauty is. Because there’s a lot of chicks now a days that look at magazines and look at unrealistic body types or look at overly Photoshopped images and try to compare themselves to that. Dude, the person they took the picture of doesn’t even look like that so it’s impossible for you to look like that! I was just like, nah, I can’t do this anymore.
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| Conceptual |
I started doing a lot more beauty without it being overly retouched, overly everything else. It was just - these people are truly beautiful, just people, whether that’s black, white, thin, thick, you know, whatever, all different body types. That was really big for me to capture those different types of images of women, as well as men. It was… that was really big… it started off as me just trying to get extra little padding in my pockets but it ended up me doing it more as… I much rather shoot somebody for free to get that image out there than to try to make some money off somebody and they try to make me turn this person into somebody that they are not. I was just like yeah, I am not doing THAT anymore.
A lot of the stuff I’ve been doing recently is just on some I know this person I think this would be a cool shoot. This would be a conceptually cool, let’s do it. Like I said, clearly, there are bills so some of the stuff people pay for the stuff. At the same time, it’s just like I don’t make it a habit of trying to get people to make me… all the advertising and all the other politics that go into it… I’m not interested in that, I just want to make cool pictures. So that is a lot of where that came from.”
Where do you think you are going from here?
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| Imagery |
“Honestly, I don’t know. I mean, I have five-year goals, ten-year goals, like everybody else but I feel like because of how organic I allow [I try to allow] my life to be, just on some let it happen. If it’s the right time, it’ll be, it’s the right time. I try not to overly script or overly itinerary my life. I want it to be more just, like I say, organic. Clearly, you have goals; you have certain things you have to do by certain days or deadlines you have to meet at work.
As far as where I see my art going or where I see my voice and what I want to do imagery wise, or whatever, I really don’t know where that is going to be. Where it’s going to end up it’s more of a… if you would have asked me like five years ago do I think I would be doing this clothing line, or do I think I be doing the model photography, or whatever, I probably wouldn’t, I’d be like ’Nah, I’m a painter, why would I be taking pictures of people?’ But now it’s just, it’s a different era in my life and that can easily change with any other incidents or any other circumstance that may take place between now and the five years.
I might have a five year goal of saying yeah I want to be married with kids but something else happens where the person I was hanging with dies, or I die, or whatever, you know, anything can happen. It’s just [I feel like] if you don’t make rigid plans you can’t be disappointed. Cause there’s a lot of people that say ‘I planned to have a family by the time I was thirty and I planned to do this by the time I was thirty’ and then they live a miserable existence after that because they are thinking ‘Well I’m thirty now and I’m not where I wanted to be.’ Or twenty-five, thirty-five, forty, whatever, so I’ve always just been like when it’s time it’s time, if it’s the right time it will happen.
Until then, I’m just going to enjoy every day and try to live it as best as possible cause I [really] just don’t believe in the whole ‘I’m having a bad day’ mentality. It’s always like there are things that happen in every single persons day that you can take it and decided to have a bad day. There’s other things that happen where you can’t help but to have a bad day. You find out that you have cancer or you find out that your mom passed away [or something] clearly, that’s a bad day. But there is other stuff like - I woke up late, I missed my bus, I left my wallet at home, I had to go back and get it, and people are like ‘Man, I’m having such a bad day!’ You did that because you had one bad thing that happened at the beginning of the day and your attitude affected every other interaction you had. It made everything else bad situations that happened.
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| Not that guy |
I try to keep myself even keel and just say ‘A’ight bad things happen throughout the day but you STILL have to keep a positive attitude.’ Cause I’m pretty free flowing, happy go lucky, but I’m not really on the feel sorry for myself bandwagon. No matter what it is, it is what it is, time to make the most of it and keep it moving. You can sit in there and wallow in it all day but it’s really not doing you any good but hurting your productivity and hurting your personality. So, yeah, I’m not going to be that guy.”
Did you foresee any of this? I know you say you do not over itinerary your life… you have your goals and stuff for the future, but…
“Yeah. I’ve always felt that I would never be a ‘sit behind somebody’s desk and do day job work.’ Did I think I was going to be famous? Did I think I was going to be rich? That was cool if it happened. That was going to be cool but I was more so concerned with people seeing my work. People knowing me for my work, recognizing me for my work. Whether that’s literally recognizing me on the street or recognizing me like ‘Oh, I’ve seen that name before, I’ve seen artwork associated with that name before.’ I was more so concerned with that, so yeah, I can say I saw that coming.
But the specifics of it, like did I know I was going to be at events every weekend or out of town every weekend sitting at a booth selling t-shirts? No. Did I know that I would be doing photography for different concerts that come through the city? People asking me ‘Yo, I need you to do these pictures.’ I feel like if you work hard enough and keep doing the right type of work, eventually things are going to happen.
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| Success |
I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell probably two or three years ago and one of the chapters were talking about 10,000 hours. Or the concept of 10,000 hours dedicated to any one task or any one idea will pretty much guarantee you success in that field. So if you put in your 10,000 hours in painting, or 10,000 hours in photography, or 10,000 hours in selling t-shirts, whatever that is, eventually you’re going to be successful in that field because you can’t help but…
Some of the things he talks about in the book are how many hours Steve Jobs put into building Apple or how many hours Bill Gates put into building Windows or Michael Jordan put into shooting free throws and then getting in the game. Once I read that book, it kind of… I know people use the term ‘life changing’ all the time but that was one of those ones where it’s ‘Okay, yeah, you keep doing the right type of work even if you are not seeing any dividends right now you’ll eventually see it.’
So that’s kind of how I live my life now, just keep doing and keep being diligent about it, keep pushing yourself and not getting complacent and just keep growing. Cause I feel like every single piece that I do, every single artwork or painting, every single photo, anything I do I feel like the last one I did was the best that I’ve ever done. So if you ever ask me [if I just did one last night] what’s the best painting you ever did, I’m like ‘Yeah, that one!’ Until I do another painting then it’s ‘Well, nah, this one is kind of better than this one.’ Because just the things that I learn as I’m doing each one. It’s as much about the final product as it is about the process of getting to the final product.
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| Artist |
I think that is how I live my life in every aspect. It’s not just about getting to a certain point, it’s all about the interactions and the journey to get to that point. How you interact with people [and] how you interact with the painting, I feel like it’s all the same thing just you struggle [even with relationships] you struggle with the painting, it sucks, it looks terrible, you’re thinking ‘Yeah, I’m going to quit, I am not going to keep doing this cause this sucks.’ Then you work through it and you’re like ‘Yeah, it might be the best painting I’ve ever done.’
It’s the same thing how I try to approach all aspects of life, as bad as it may be now it’s going to get better if you keep pushing. If you quit you’ll never get that growth or never get to see yourself get to that next level cause you are NEVER going to get to that next level on EASY. You have to… if you are going to grow and get better… you have to struggle to get it cause it’s not worth having if it’s easy. That’s with anything. I try to keep that at the forefront of my mind in everything I do. What can I do to be better than I was yesterday?
One of the other [things] I do periodically… more so like every year… I try to figure out if 2012 version of me was competing against 2011 version of me for a job, would 2012 version of me win. I always keep pushing and keep that in mind. If I was doing the same thing last November or last December, why am I still doing the same thing now? I got to get better than I was last year so I keep that in the back of my mind too. How can I put 2011 version of me out of business?
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| Superhuman |
I think with that mentality too, it’s just ‘A’ight cool, I don’t have time to sit here and play video games for three hours a day or watch TV for four hours a day or whatever or sleep all day.’ I think about that too, especially with other clothing brands, or with everything else. I’m always just like well while I’m sleep or while I’m playing this game somebody else in this same lane is working right now. I’m like ‘Nah, turn this game off’ or get my butt out the bed, I need to be working right now. I can’t tell you how many times I worked on a painting before I went to work, sketched out some stuff like ‘Oh, I can fix that during my lunch break’ and then go home and keep painting. Stay up to three o’clock in the morning, then wake up early again so I can paint some more before I go to work. See stuff like that, you have to do superhuman things in order to get that level of notoriety, that level of richness.
With me, I don’t think monetary riches are necessarily what I’m after. Clearly, I live in the same world that everyone else lives in [and you have to pay for things] and it would be very much easier if I had a lot of money to pay for those things. That’s important, but it’s not like, if I die and I’m never just filthy rich, it’s not like I have lived a poor life. It’s everything else, like other interactions I have with other people, other stuff that I look at as far as being rich as well. So, yeah, I think that’s big for how I perceive how I go through life period.”
I have a question, it is kind of off on a tangent but I just really want your perspective on it. Obviously, since you have been doing art for a long time you have seen how things have evolved. Where is it going? What is going to be, or potentially be, the next new medium?
“I think with art, as with anything, it’s based on fad, it’s based on what’s popular now. The stuff that ends up sticking around in textbooks years to come is clearly the timeless stuff. You have to have a little bit of distance away from it, a little perspective from it to appreciate [it] like ‘Oh, okay that was kind of cool back then.’ Like people that saw Andy Warhol’s work or Basquiat’s work at the time didn’t appreciate it, they thought ‘No this is not art, this is not art!’
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| Illmatic Fitted |
That’s the same thing now, people are doing things, like true hip-hop heads are like ‘Look, Soulja Boy is NOT hip-hop, DON’T tell me that’s hip-hop. Jay-Z, Nas, THAT’S hip-hop.’ Not saying that Soulja Boy, when we look at it ten years from now, it’s going to be like ‘Oh, Soulja Boy was innovative.’ But if you look at some of the things that Soulja Boy did he was kind of innovative. He was one of the first artists to get signed off a YouTube channel, using the internet to pretty much get his stardom [his fan base]. Even though his music sucks [and everything that he does and everything he’s about or is], I still appreciate him being innovative enough to change the game.
I think that to try to guess what’s going to be next thing, I think is impossible because that’s just like trying to figure out what’s going to be the next fashion trend. That’s really hard to pinpoint what’s going to be next. But I think art, as well as fashion, is so based upon what’s hot right now. There is no way to predict it. Anyone can come out tomorrow wearing… I don’t know… a book in their hair tomorrow and if the right person does it then everybody wants to do that now. So it’s just like ‘Oh, okay.’
Where I see art going now, I think that as far as the movement, I see a lot of the contemporary artists now are going back to the super, hyper-realism stuff. Or maybe that’s just the stuff I pay attention to because that’s the stuff that interest me. But there are certain artists that are going back to that super-ridiculous, hyper-realism and I think that might be the next big movement, I guess [if you can say movement]. Just because I’m seeing a lot more people trying to make that hybrid between renaissance realism and surrealism movement.
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| Joker Munny |
Ron English, or somebody like that, they’re taking that pop-art version, Andy Warhol stuff - Ronald McDonald, Barney, Charlie Brown, SpongeBob… KAWS as well… They’re taking all of these super pop images and making them art, fine art by doing things from making little vinyl toys out of them or painting these super realistic, super like ‘There is no way this can exist in real life!’ I think a lot of that is coming from… back when surrealism was around, renaissance, baroque, when all of that stuff was around, they didn’t have the internet, they didn’t have Photoshop to build these images, they just had what they had in their head, or what their model was posing for.
But now, with the advent of the internet and Photoshop, these people can put together these really amazing composition images and then paint from those as references. It’s creating a whole new hybrid genre, kind of like graphic design, pop art meets painting and fine art. So, like I said, as far as where it’s going to go from there, I don’t know, but I think what I really pay attention to a lot now is that hybrid graphic design because that‘s what I got my degree in school was Graphic Design.
Now people are going to a block color where it looks like a machine did it or it looks like no hand touched it. I think that stuff is what’s NOW in short term future but it’s just too tough to try to figure out what’s going to be next. Well it might be, I don’t know, it might be painting on mattresses tomorrow instead of canvasses. I’ll be like ‘A’ight, I didn’t see that coming at all. I don’t know what to do about that.’”
“Oh yeah, absolutely, there are paintings I’ve done that I LOVED when I did them, I absolutely loved them, and then I see them now and I was like ‘God, I was terrible! This is horrible! I cannot believe I let people see this! This is bad!’ And then there are other ones, even with photography I have seen stuff, mostly pictures from one set, and I’m like ‘Yeah, that’s the best pictures from this set’ and I’m not even going to look at these other ones any more. Then randomly I’ll go back through and look at pictures, just for nostalgia value, sometimes you just need that motivation - ‘Well, shoot, I was doing this two years ago. Come on man! Kick start yourself!’
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| Photographer |
I look at it like ‘Yo, why didn’t I ever post this, this is an AMAZING photo or this is an amazing painting, why didn’t I ever show people this?’ So yeah, there’s actually many times where I go through… and I just recently did this when I built my new website last week. I had to go through all these hard drives and all these photos of paintings I have done. I’m looking through all of it and I’m just like ‘Dude, if I could only have ‘x’ amount on my website.’ I could put as many as I want on my website but I’m not a fan of pagination on websites. I don’t want somebody to have to keep clicking page after page after page of artwork. If I’m only going to put this amount of artwork on this site, what are my best pieces? If somebody didn’t know me, some alien came here and said show me his best work, what would they see?
When I’m picking those, sometimes it gets kind of hard cause I’m like do I want to pick this one or this one? There are ones that a year ago, or two years ago, I would have said ‘Yeah, definitely that’s going on there!’ Now, no one will ever see this again! This is terrible! The internet is out there. It’s been posted on the internet so people have seen it, it’s going to be out there forever but some stuff I’m like ‘Yo, I will never post this again!’ Unless it’s on some laugh at me type stuff ‘Yeah, look how bad I used to be!’ Cause I’m all for that too, I like making fun of myself sometimes too. But some stuff… ‘Dude, there is no way I’m letting you post this.’
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| Artistic Profiles |
I think there are certain things now, because you have different sensibilities than you did when you painted it, you’ve had different experiences that you’ve been through since you painted it, drew it, or took a picture of it so now it might mean something more to you or something less to you. I think that it’s really interesting to go back. Like if you had me to pick out artwork today and I had never did any more artwork from now to five years from now and I picked out something today, what my favorite pieces were, I feel like over half of them would be different five years from now [as] what I would pick as my favorite pieces. But then again some of them might be ’No, that’s always and forever going to be one of my favorite paintings that I’ve ever done.’ So I think it’s just a matter of your experiences and your sensibilities and how they change over the years.”
I know you mentioned a couple artists. However, are there some new up and coming people you see or have seen and feel like ‘Okay, they are on the right path’? Or do you really not have the time?
“Yes, I do. I try to go to as many art shows as I can. I try to pay attention to as many artists as I can but because of the internet, it’s really hard to keep up with everything that’s being produced. I see so many good images with Tumblr; people are re-blogging and really making things viral really quick. I see images that I love and I’m like ‘Yo, that is dope and I’m mad that I didn’t do that first.’ That happens more often than not but as far as names of artists, I know people locally here that I’m like ‘Yo, this dude is really doing it big!’
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| Sam with the Hair & Biggs |
It’s really weird how small the world is, my girlfriend’s painting instructor at UTA was in class with me when I was at UTA. Carlos [DonJuan] is one of my favorite, favorite artists of all time. He is with the Sour Grapes – this crew of painters. Carlos is one of my favorite painters just because he does stuff similar to what I do in terms of take. When I was a kid, I used to draw stuff that my parents couldn’t afford to get me, so I would draw myself in these things cause it would be my way of having it. So I would be like ‘Well I can’t afford these shoes or I can’t afford this shirt so I’ll draw myself in it and be like well shoot I got it – I got a drawing of me in it right there.’ So it’s kind of the same, I think he kind of does the same thing.
It was really big when I was in high school and early college to draw and tell the experience of the Black Artists or the Urban Artists. Because a lot of stuff that is being seen in galleries [previous to recently] a lot of stuff that had been seen in galleries was really… I don’t even know what word to use… was really artsy. Just like, you have to be an artist to appreciate it sometimes. But I think now with Kehinde Wiley, Mike Thompson, these dudes are really big on hyper-realism stuff. They perfected what I thought I would like to do back then. I still like to do it, but they got really good at it. Now I’m just like ‘Yeah, they are better than me at it! I’m going to let them have it!’ I’ll just appreciate it from what they’re doing.
What they do is tell the Urban Youth Story but in a more renaissance way. Kehinde Wiley does a lot of work; it’ll be some hood black guy with braids and a baseball jersey, sagging pants, Timberlands, on a horse, bareback from an image from an actual renaissance painting. He does a lot of background details and really, really meticulous work and it’s similar to that. It’s really some – I want to tell that story. Kehinde Wiley, I really like his stuff. Mike Thompson, he’s a little straighter, he does a lot of digital paintings and stuff, he is one of my inspirations of why I do digital paintings now.
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| Air Jordan XI |
Carlos does a lot of little detailed stuff I appreciate, if he is painting about a dude and his girlfriend, the details in it – he’ll have on a G-Shock Watch or some Jordan’s that are really rare, something like that. I can appreciate that part of it too. Cause what you’re doing is, you are telling that message but it’s more attainable, it’s more tangible because I recognize those shoes, I recognize that watch, I recognize that brand he’s wearing on the t-shirt. Stuff like that. I’m like ‘Yeah, I do the same thing’ so I appreciate when I see other people do it well or better than me. ‘Yeah, I like that!’
As far as other artists, I’m trying to think of anybody right now to say up and coming. I don’t want to say Carlos or Kehinde are up and coming. They are not up and coming, they are established. Yeah, they’re doing their thing. As far as up and coming young dudes or young women, I don’t know names, I just know a lot of good images that are on blogs I follow on Tumblr and other stuff online and Facebook. I can point you to images that I’m just like ‘Yo, that’s dope, that’s super dope!’ I [unfortunately] don’t know… cause people don’t put their real names… the internet culture is so anonymous.
I think that too ties in to [on a tangent] why people be so hateful because they are like ‘Man, I’m hiding behind a computer screen. You will never find me. I can be as racists as I want to be right now or as homophobic as I want to be right now because you are not going to find me.’ I’m just like that is so retarded. If I could figure out a way to invent the way to just show up at their house, just briefly, and be like ‘Yeah, I CAN find you!’ Not to do anything, just to be like I can find you and then disappear into the darkness. Yeah, it would be all good.”
Is there anything else you want to include or say?
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| Keep working |
“The one thing I always tell people is figure out… a lot of people are always like I want to do work, I want to do one of these paintings, I want to be this great artist, I want to be this great photographer, and they always ask me ‘Teach me something.’ What I always tell them is… I’m not saying figure out your own voice cause some people might just be creating images because they have to create images. They might not have anything they are trying to say. Or anything that they want to say to people. Or they’re just like, I like drawing, I like painting. I’m not going to say someone has to find their voice but I think a lot people just have to figure out what it is they want to do and than DO that.
One thing I always ask people when they are like ‘How did you figure out what you wanted to do? How did you figure out what your technique was going to be for painting?’ Well, I just did it; I just keep doing it and keep doing it. Even when you don’t feel like doing it! Even when you’re having artist’s block, you keep working, keep working. Because the more you work through it the more… especially in times when you are struggling and it doesn’t come easy to you, if you keep working through that … you start learning things about yourself. You start learning things about art period that you might not have done.
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| Freeform |
I had this really big period in college where I just didn’t want to paint anymore. I was tired. I was burnt out. I just did not want to paint anymore and I had stopped painting so realistically and started just throwing paint on canvas. Literally, splashing paint, being as messy as possible, dripping paint, doing something that was really out of character for me. From that I learned I kind of liked the freeness of that. It’s something that I had been so rigid all my whole life about – making sure these lines lined up just right so it could be as photorealistic as possible. It freed me up a lot because I worked through that tough time.
I always tell people keep working through the tough times. Then, if money wasn’t an issue… with anything, not just with art… if money wasn’t an issue, you had as much money as you can ever spend in life, what would you do with the rest of your life? How would you spend the rest of the time? A lot of people are like ‘I would travel.’ Oh, okay, you would travel, that’s cool. What are you going to do when you travel? Eventually everything is going to start looking alike. Rhode Island is going to look exactly like Oregon; parts of Texas are going to look exactly like parts of Oklahoma or Montana.
After you do that, then what? What are you going to do? What are you going to do when you get there? What experiences are you trying to have when you get there? I feel if people are honest with themselves about what they want to do then THAT [to me] is what your passion is supposed to be, what you are suppose to be doing in your life. If you’re like ‘I’m going to travel.’ Okay you’re a traveler. You are a professional traveler. Figure out a way to get paid to do traveling. Or ‘Well, I would eat all day’, then figure out a way to get paid to eat. Or whatever it is, just figure out a way to get paid to do whatever it is because if you can figure that out, than you’ll be a lot happier in your life.
I know too many people who hate their day jobs and with me, I’m cool with my day job. My day job doesn’t suck [but] would I much rather be doing art all day? Yeah, absolutely! It’s just a matter of trying to figure out what that is and then putting in however many hours it takes to figure out how to get paid for that thing. No matter what THAT thing is. It’s up to you, what ever you want to do.”
Jeremy has his finger on the pulse of fashion, art and photography and at times resuscitating it from its slumber, although, he would more than likely humbly disagree with me. He is the NOW. While others may find themselves reflecting on some once upon a time, Jeremy is living in the moment. Some may stagnate, being bogged down with the mundane, constantly revisiting the same moment, space and time, yet never mastering anything. Jeremy, however, has perfected his technique. He has worked through his struggles. He is following every one of his dreams and passions. He has freed his mind allowing it to take flight wherever his imagination, aspiration and ambition take him. Jeremy is the master of his universe. Disappearing into the darkness. Superhero. Now that is something for you to ponder while beginning your travels off the grid...
Be Strong… Stay Strong… Live Strong… Love Strong… Asuecion
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