I am a digital caricature artist from Brooklyn, N.Y., currently based in Monroe County, Pennsylvania. But this page will explain who I am from my humble beginings.
The 1960s were a highly turbulent decade for this country. People stood up to fight the status quo and the status quo fought back with a vengeance. So, somewhere between the murders of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I was born.
This is me celebrating my first year or two of being alive. (Whew! I made it.) It was during these years my parents decided to evolve from the lowly status of living in a Brooklyn tenement building, to joining the upper class people living in public housing. We moved on up just before The Jeffersons did.
I was probably about 3 or 4 years old when I started drawing. Here's a picture of me copying a drawing from one of my reading books. This was before I had any concept of cross contamination, because I would never draw on a kitchen floor today. Yuck.
The year I started school was the final year that children in our housing development were bussed into the neighboring zoned school. In the following year, kids were bussed to the opposite end of Brooklyn.
I continued to draw a lot during those years. I wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the box, but I did okay. The kids liked me because I had a talent. And because I was quiet. And a little silly. Just a little.
I don't recall taking this picture... Or wearing this suit... Or what I was thinking as I was taking this picture wearing this suit.
Upon graduating The High School of Art and Design with talented cartoonists such as Andre Leroy Davis, Kevin Greene, Dwayne Turner and Eric Palma, I went to The School of Visual Arts with the intent of becoming a guy who gets paid for making his own cartoons. That didn't work out very well.
It was during these years I began to understand the art of the celebrity caricature. My earliest color caricature is probably my Melle Mel drawing. Although I started using Prismacolors at that time, I continued to work with pen and ink throughout the 80s.
During the 1990s, I didn't produce nearly as many drawings as I had in previous years. Nor did I take as many pictures. One may have to wonder if I even existed in the nineties. But, I'm pretty sure I did.
Within the last ten years, I've been trying my hand at creating digitally. It was during these years I began to figure out how to animate for the first time. Although it's 3 dimensional animation, the basics are still the same as traditional. Of course, I'm old and crusty, now... but I think the future is rather bright for me. Or maybe that's the photo above swaying my judgement. It was particularly sunny that day. I'm just saying.