Inspirations n'at

Hello,

I will first list the artist that has greatly inspired my art making processes because I feel he is important enough to do so. After all, I have been studying his art since I was a young demented kid. Anyway, I was first exposed to Ed "Big Daddy" Roth sometime when I was young enough to be fortunate to play with matchbox cars on an everyday basis. At first, Roth created T-shirts that had images of "over the top" abstracted muscle cars that had huge engines sticking out of the hood with flames flying out of the exhaust. At the same time, ripping out of the top of these cars were grotesque monsters with bulging eyes, tongues dripping slobber, and flies buzzing around them!! What more could any kid want??? But what really attracted me were the toys and models that were produced to replicate his greatest works of art...Roth was actually a custom car builder who used fiberglass and random scrap car parts to create his masterpieces. Over time he inspired generations of gear heads and low brow artists to continue to pull resources from his work and modify them within their own. His most famed character "Rat Fink" was meant to be an anti-Mickey Mouse created on a napkin due to Roth despising the flashiness of Disney world. Ed Roth can be found at www.ratfink.com or if anyone would like to, I have the film "Tales of the Rat Fink" that is a documentary and you are welcome to borrow it!

On that note, It is probably no surprise that the car world is a huge inspiration on my artwork. Muscle cars, monster trucks, car emblems and parts eroding over time, and just plain old junk cars are what I mostly pull ideas from. I use these cars as a reminder that most things in life will eventually rot away, so I create a lot of my heavily content based work on time and human existence. On the other hand, I find it successfully rewarding to just go off the wall and express my feelings through the grotesque "Big Daddy" influences that I have. Basically like a Jekyll and Hyde kind of thing.

Finally, speaking of Jekyll and Hyde, I often times try to get inspirations from old black and white B movies. Throughout High School I was almost obsessed with these types of ideas and made mostly high contrast black and white images that had a scary Halloween theme to them. I was pretty much producing the same type of work found on most Rockabilly or horror punk t-shirts that have become ever so popular.

To this day I still use all of these influences in my work but I am trying to blend them together to get a more unified look that shows where my influences came from.