I was born in Tuba City on the Navajo Reservation in the late summer of 1973. My mother was alone when she went into labor. Everyone in Tuba went to the Navajo Nation fair that day. Even my own father was off riding saddle bronc in a rodeo. They announced my birth over the m.c. just as my dad left the shoot. They say he lasted about a second and was bucked off. My father is an artist. He's the Navajo Nation's very own Jackson Pollock, complete with the raging alcoholic tendencies. I grew up watching him paint in his studio in Gray Mountain. I passed many hours there rifling through his art books and the occasional Penthouse. Other Indians talk about being Indian, and I really have no idea what that means. I grew up in my own little bohemian art enclave. If Indian means watching your father booze up and beat your mother, then I'd say that I have a swollen belly full of experiences of being Indian. Sometimes I wonder if Dostoyevsky was an Indian straight from the reservation. Notes From The Rez. So I learned how to draw before I could write. In my lonely corners as a child a pencil, some paper and a dog were my constant companions. At that age I learned how to escape. People ask me how to become good at drawing. I have no clue what to tell them except maybe to have a miserable childhood. It wasn't all bad though. My uncles, aunts and cousins were my family. If I ever feel Indian, it's when I'm around them. I remember herding sheep, eating mutton, drinking cheap shastas cola from Bashas, and helping my grandmother card wool for her weavings. Around my teens my mother met an Irish Catholic Lawyer. Me, my sister and my mother came to Belen, NM with this Irish Catholic Lawyer. He claimed to be a quarter Shawnee. I never did understand why some people gave me their blood fractions. Shawnee blood didn't make me like him any better. Life in New Mexico in a small railroad town and being the only Indians surrounded by Jaramillos, Bacas, Sanchez's, and Vigils wasn't hell, but it wasn't heaven either. I was mostly disturbed by the fact that there were no bookstores in town. I escaped again, this time into classical guitar and Hemingway. I played a recital once for Hector Garcia. After four years of studying Bach and Led Zeppelin, I thought I was a guitar badass. Around 16 years old I stopped drawing. I thought, "fuck it, I don't want it, art is for the birds." To everyone's surprise, because I never attended any science courses in high school, I went to college at New Mexico Tech. I was a good student for one semester. After that I drank and played in a college band for the next 2 years. Then in 1994, I dropped out and joined Uncle Sam's Misguided Children, where I served as a not so intelligent signals intelligence analyst. It was a four year circle jerk fueled by fake machismo, alcohol, insubordination, dive bars, strippers and LSD. I've blacked out on heroic alcohol binges in just about every Asian country from Korea to Thailand. I don't regret a single day. After my honorable discharge, I tried to continue a life without consequences but soon realized how stupid that was after waking up in a jail cell in St. Johns, AZ. So from 1998 to 2005, I held roughly about 20 different jobs or so, some for only a week at best. I drank a lot of booze. Slept around a lot. Woke up in a lot of dumpsters. In January of 2005 I watched my aunt die of alcoholism in a Tuba City hospital. I don't know why, but at that moment I decided to go back to art. I was 31 years old. It had been 15 years since I drew or painted anything. So, here I am, painting and drawing and doing my best to do it with some balls and some honesty. I hope you enjoy the art, because it's the truth and it comes from my heart.
