Why I started selling artwork 4 1/2 years ago...

Kurt Cobain, Sharpie scribble style drawing, 18" X 24", November 2017.  This was the first drawing that sold at my first solo show.

The first two decades of the 21st century have been a rough ride for me.  My weird line of odd jobs led to a good paying job as a lighting technician in 1998.  Basically, I was a lighting roadie who didn't go on the road.  I worked in a warehouse in North Hollywood, cleaning and prepping lights to go out to TV shows, movie premieres, and corporate parties.  I made $14 and hour, got a fair amount of overtime, and liked my job.  But I had what appeared to be a tiny hernia when I started.  That turned into a huge hernia, due to the daily heavy lifting.  I had to take time off, had issues with my insurance, was unable to get surgery, and wound up working as a taxi driver in late 1999, back down in Huntington Beach.

In 5 months, I went from a cool job with money in the bank to living in a taxi, working 7 days a week.  That was my situation as I watched the new millennium roll in, on New Year's Eve 1999.  I soon had a room to live in again, but a long period of struggle began.  My car got towed in 2000 for parking tickets, when I was just starting to get back into the entertainment industry.  Back to taxi driving, an industry which soon got disrupted by new technology.

That intro into the 21st century led to what has now been 20 years of financial struggle.  I just figured out that I've spent 11 years and 9 months in some form of homelessness, since August 1999.  I was working full time (or far beyond full time in the taxi) for 7 1/2 or 8 of those years.  And I've now spent 3 years and 9 months actually living on the streets, in three states.  There have been a whole bunch of reasons for this struggle, and that list does not include alcohol and drug use.  Those aren't my issues.  I don't drink at all these days, I just quit when driving a taxi.  I don't use drugs, other than the occasional prescription for an illness.  The stereotypical homeless issues aren't what led to this struggle.  I had an incredible amount of pressure from outside forces on my life, I didn't have a real strong direction at times, and I just couldn't find a "real job" for years at a time.  Nobody wants to hire a former cabbie for a "real" job.

By November of 2015, I was living with my mom, at 49 years old, for three years, after my dad's death in 2012.  We lived in a small apartment in a tiny town in North Carolina.  I couldn't get hired for any job at all, not even for a restaurant or gas station clerk.  We lived off my mom's social security check, and I drove her around for doctor's appointments, shopping, and scraped by.  The only thing I did that made any money was my weird, unique Sharpie marker art.  I'd occasionally get asked to draw a kid's name, by their mom, to put up in their room.  I'd done those drawings for my niece and nephew, and others wanted drawings.

So I decided to focus on my Sharpie marker art.  It wasn't some idea of "I want to become a famous artist."  It was simply that nothing else I was doing then gave me any chance of making any kind of living.  So I stepped up my artwork, started drawing people, and promoting my drawings on Facebook.  I had a following from doing several years of blogs, for the Old SchoolBMX freestyle world.  While I have always been a creative guy, I was never known as a visual artist.  I literally didn't have a dime when I started.  I only had some art supplies, and a $65 refurbished laptop, still running Windows XP in 2015.  I had no idea what would happen.

Because I was just scraping by for so long, and in and out of homelessness, I couldn't raise any money from family or friends to give my little business idea a real chance at "success."  But I started getting orders.  I learned how to promote my art well online.  I started selling artwork, originals that first took 22 to 25 hours each.  These days, my large drawings take 40 to 45 hours each, and I can sell them for $150-$160 pretty easily.  So I can sell art, at least until this Covid-19 shutdown hit hard.  But I was never able to make decent money for the time I was putting into my drawings.  But I HAVE been able to scrape by, as a working artist, for 4 1/2 years.  I had no idea if that was possible when I started. And now I have about 120 drawings to show for this time period.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, and the economic downturn, things have finally slowed down, though I was doing better when the virus first hit.  But I'm back in Southern California, where I want to live, and in a big metro where other options are available, now that the virus and recession have slowed down buying of almost everything.

I'm now going to head in another direction to work on earning money, though I still want to spend some time doing artwork nearly every day.  But I somehow managed to survive, though homeless much of time, as a working artist, starting from nothing, in an obscure, rural, North Carolina town.  I have very little money, but I have this body of work online, and have established myself as a unique and halfway decent visual artist.  And that's pretty cool.  I've sold about 90 originals and maybe 120 prints, over this time.  My art has sold, and is hanging on walls, on 6 of the 7 continents, a 8-12 countries, and a dozen U.S. states.  Really.  I never expected that back in 2015.

My point for this post?  I tried something that sounded ridiculous, and had a lot of success in spending time doing work I loved doing, but didn't make much money.  In crazy times, when options seem limited, you never know what is possible, until you try.

Kobe Bryant tribute art skateboard deck, one of my recent works. #sharpiescribblestyle