I think I took a wrong turn in the spirit world and accidentally ended up being born in a small town in Michigan.  Or maybe I was meant to suffer the cold long winters and the steady mediocrity that pervaded the land. Sure, it’s a nice place to raise a family, but a terrible place to be young and filled with chaos. When I was 14 I got into punk music and the punk scene and it was a powerful and creative way to channel the shitstorm in my soul. It had a deep impression on who I was, who I became and who I am still today. I got kicked out of high school for fighting and graduated from another school. It was here that my art teacher gave me a large canvas and let me paint whatever I wanted; I finally had a place to transmute the things seething inside me, the power of colors and the freedom of the canvas also had a deep impression on me. 

At 17 I moved out on my own; I had a girl, a dog, a job, an apartment; all the things a young man might appreciate. However, after some time it all melted away and the inner chaos took the steering wheel. I flung myself to the most fucked place I could think of: India. I spent a year traveling and ended up staying in different Buddhist monasteries, studying and meditating where I learned to cultivate and sharpen my x-ray vision. When I came back to the U.S. I landed on the streets of Berkeley, California. I slept behind an insurance building on Telegraph ave and ate at Food Not Bombs and Wingnut Breakfast with the other homeless. They taught me chess as well as the ins and outs of survival.

After staying long enough in the Bay Area I started doing college courses and over time went to grad school for philosophy. It was during this time that I started to take art more seriously, working every chance I had on painting while still attending school. I’ve now been here in San Francisco for over 25 years so I’ve seen a lot. I’ve had knives pulled on me, dogs hump my leg, and more than once I’ve walked by old men who’ve collapsed on the street, paramedics pushing on their chest. And there’s nothing to do but keep walking as if someone isn’t dead on the street. This is city life. I mostly love it.

The art I do is informed by what I see around me, what my intuitions tell me, and what the time period I'm living in tells me about the human psyche. Science, technology, death, decay, love, struggle are all topics I relate to. They’re the undercurrent themes that inform our lives and I try to express all this, and to the extent that I fail to communicate things according to my visions, you can still enjoy my failures.

-Locust

San Francisco, California

2022