Do you do collaborations with other artists?
I love collaborating. I love working alone but I think collaborations are really fun, too.
One, you get to meet and hang out with other artists and you can bounce ideas off each other and feed off each other. Like big mural projects, it gets lonely if you’re on a lift all by yourself. And a lot of times you need somebody on the ground looking up at the mural saying, You know, maybe adjust the nose this way, or, This piece needs to be bigger. It’s really helpful to have multiple people.
And then also knowing what other people’s strengths are and building on those. So if somebody is really good at this one component, then you can support them in that in the collaboration. I love the puzzle of tying it all together.
When it comes to making art, it’s really fun collaborating. If I could collaborate more I would enjoy that a lot. That’s how I would like to be, I think. I would like to have a career that would be, like, half collaboration and half individual art, that would be great.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with director Ben Moon for maybe 5 years now and it’s always a delight, and a reminder of the joy of collaboration.
Ultimately, over the years I think collaborating with good friends has been the most rewarding part of filmmaking, both in terms of memories created and in learning and advancing my own way of looking at films and at how one can move through the world.
Artists can be serious control freaks (I’m certainly one of them) and I think learning to give a little of that control away, to collaborate and play well with others, is incredibly valuable as a human being, in any occupation or place in life
[I do collaborations] just because it’s fun, yeah.The latest art collaboration I think I did, other than these skateboards, was with Isaac Nichols, this local tattoo artist, he draws in a really cool old-school Japanese folklore kind of style, we just got together and did pieces.
It came from him just coming over and us coming up with this idea of, Hey, it would be fun if we passed the drawing back and forth. Then it just so happened at that time Snow City Café was like, Hey, do you want an art show? And I was like, Yes, perfect. I pitched it to Isaac and he was more than down and a couple of months later we had our collaborative show there. It was rad.
When we first started working collaboratively Jaime [Molina] would do one thing and then I would do one thing and then maybe we’d meet somewhere in the middle. The pieces were good but I don’t know if they were at their best.
But once we let go of our egos and just worked on everything together — where it’s not so much about him, it’s not so much about me, it’s mostly about the piece — then it was easier.
I think that’s almost the same when working with a client. In my mind, the work needs to be as much for them as it is for you. Because the more emotionally attached they are to it, about the creation of it, the happier they’re going to be with the product.