The Birth of my Sharpie Scribble Style
A few days before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the gulf coast in 2005, I was sitting in my taxi one morning, near the entrance of the Huntington Beach Hyatt hotel, a block form thre Picific ocean. A taxi driver I knew walked up to my cab, from where he parked at the back of the line. Richard was a weird dude, in a good way. He was a long time taxi driver, which was a crazy way to make a living, even in good times. He was also an old punk rock influenced guy, and a highly creative and controversial artist. He owned and ran a small indie art gallery called AAA Electra 99. Here's a taste of Richard at the Anaheim location of Electra.
I knew Richard from the taxi company, and I had drawn some stuff for a couple of taxi driver art shows he had, and was an occasional visitor to the gallery. So Richard walked up, hopped in the back of my taxi, and said he had a deal for me. The deal was I could live in the art gallery for $50 a week, and then drive his taxi (he owned his cab, within the company we worked for) on the weekends.
When he offered me this deal, I was working 7 days a week, homeless, and living in my cab. I worked 16-18 hours a day Tuesday through Saturday. Sundays I'd work from about 7 am to about 2 or 3pm. Then I'd go rent a motel room for the night. I'd get a pizza, watch some TV, and sleep for 10 to 12 hours. I'd wake up at 5 am, go catch a couple of Monday morning airport runs in the taxi, go back to the motel room, and chill and watch TV until checkout at 11 am. Then I'd work in the cab from 11 am Monday until after bar close at 2 am. I had been doing this, week after week, for two years straight, as the taxi industry went down the tubes due to computer dispatching.
That adds up to about 100 to 120 hours a week of work. Yeah, it wasn't physical work, "working" in a taxi mostly meant sitting and waiting to hit a button on the computer when a call popped up. We couldn't leave the cab, or we might miss that $40 ride that would make the day profitable. Not hard "work" but monotonous.
In two years, I had about five days off. I don't mean that I had weekends off like normal people, and then took five more days off. I mean I literally had five days off in two years. To say I was burned out is a huge understatement. In the year 2000, I could rent a taxi on the weekends, work 40 hours in three long days, and pocket about $350. I rented a cheap room, lived in a beach city, and had four days off.
But in 2003, the taxi company took the old CB radios out of the cabs, and put in dispatch computers. Overnight, the industry completely changed. That's when technology really began to disrupt the taxi business, years before Uber and Lyft entered the picture. We all had to either quit, or work 7 days a week. Meanwhile, the computer dispatching let the companies put more and more cabs on the road, so there was less business per driver. So it got harder and harder to make money, and we all worked more and more hours. AND I was homeless, living in my taxi, and sleeping in parking lots six nights a week. I'd bulked up to about 370 pounds, did nothing but work and sleep, and I was burned out, fat, pissed off, and miserable.
I took Richard's offer, and I moved into the Electra gallery, the small industrial unit in Anaheim you see in the link above. I've always been a highly creative guy, but had done nothing creative in two years. Suddenly I had 4 1/2 days off, and was surrounded on all sides by art from some of Orange County's most weird, fun, and creative people. I started drawing with markers huge pieces of paper, cut from a roll of banner paper.
I was never was much into painting. I got into drawing with markers in 2003, when I saw a thing on MTV's House of Style about putting butcher paper up on your walls, and drawing on it to make "doodle art" walls. I lived in the little room, and tried to make a mural with markers. It sucked. So I wound up making big collages with the paper instead, cutting photos from my old BMX, skateboard, snowboard, and rock climbing magazines. In between photos, I doodled, trying to find a cool ways to shade with markers.
Back in 2005 at the art gallery, I drew a little drawing in pen my second night there, just a doodle. My creative floodgates opened, and I began drawing all day, every day. I went back to experimenting with markers. A couple of months later, while drawing a tree, I scribbled with one color. Then scribbled over it with another. Then another. I wound up with these cool shades of brown that actually looked like tree roots. That's when my Sharpie "scribble style" was born, October or November of 2005. I had finally found a way to shade with Sharpie markers. I soon found the smaller, ultra fine Sharpies worked much better for this. So I had a cool and unique way to color and draw with markers. I just wasn't sure what to do with it.
I lived in the gallery for about 7 months, playing with the Sharpie scribble style idea most of that time. When I went back to full time taxi driving, I got a sketch pad, and would spend many of the hours sitting in my taxi drawing. I wound up losing all those earliest drawings, dozens of them. But here are some of my drawings from 2008 to 2015. They're a long way from the kind of drawings I do now. But you have to start somewhere.
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