Born in Paris, France, and hailing from a lengthy and quite varied background in both the graphic design and entertainment industry - focusing on art, graphic design, photography, DJing, television and film production - I am continually inspired by graphic design, typography, surrealism, pop art, tattoo design, street art, comedy, cultural styles, and elements of the world that surrounds us. I like to remix popular elements and flip them on themselves to create something humorous and delightful.
I like to make people laugh and I like to play with my food. I include a lot of ridiculous puns when I present my work, as I really enjoy creating levity in a world that is so often full of negative influences. I try to focus on things that really draw people in - food is a hugely popular subject and there’s no end to the jokes I can crack about so many dishes that we know and love. Depicting them in a flash tattoo style of composition, with a clever pun written on the ribbon banner kind of elevates each dish to memorialize them permanently. I love watching people’s reactions when they see them at first, then look a bit closer, and let loose the laughter upon reading the titles and tag lines.
Animals are also a hugely popular subject, especially cats and dogs. It’s strange that we let animals into our lives - creatures that can’t really communicate that well with us, but we live side by side and become best of friends. I like to take that a step further by anthropomorphizing them onto human bodies, to give them a completely different sense of character. My previous work mostly dealt in pop culture portraiture, but that got kind of boring after a while, as there’s very little that I could draw from them creatively. I think that’s why I gravitated so quickly to putting animal heads on human bodies - it just made more sense to me to develop a more creative way of adapting parts of the human form.
I find myself entranced with the anatomy of skeletal remains of animals. Each and every one is so completely different and complex. There’s a lot of magic that remains behind after an animal decomposes in the aesthetic of their bones. Growing up, my father worked closely with indigenous people and we were always invited to powwows and gatherings where I would spend hours marvelling at the way that they decorated animal skulls for ceremonies and for decoration. As a lover of nature and the wilderness, I tend to romanticize them using flowers, stones, beads, leather rope, and feathers to create an ethereal headdress of sorts, still maintaining a mystical modern tattoo style for my compositions, drawing from this influence.
My current favourite technique is generally consistent for most of my pieces. I draw them in graphite (usually a soft 4B is my go-to), and scan the drawing and vectorize it in photoshop. I like the sketchy and loose quality graphite provides, devoid of solid, defined edges. I then set up my canvas in Photoshop and take photographs to use as my palette. I clone stamp textures and colours into the layers of the piece and use layers and effects to create various lighting and rendering. I have used all sorts of textures from raw meat to crushed velvet to concrete to sometimes create juxtapositions in subject and the expectation of what it’s textures should be. Sometimes I use the actual textures of the subject to bring it to life. It’s a painstaking process but I love the surreal quality achieved by this process. I also quite enjoy creating layered mixed media backgrounds, using coffee, spray paint, acrylic, watercolour, paint markers, and different types of handmade papers, with gel medium overlays, wheat paste, and stencils for some of my larger canvas or wood panel works.
I am often influenced by tattoo artists, pop culture, street art, local chefs, comedians, cultural paradigms, graphic design, and typography from around the world. I obsessively hunt for new influences on a regular basis to keep building on ideas or create fresh new designs.
The products that I create or design are mostly geared towards making your environment just a little bit radder, at a reasonable cost. Whether it’s apparel, accessories, skateboards, art or home decor - there’s something fun and creative for everyone to identify with, and kind of pushes back against the cookie-cutter world as a rejection of the commercially mass-produced.