ARTIST'S STATEMENT

"I feel very lucky to have developed a love for both serious painting and cartooning early in my artistic development. I see it as a bilingual approach to my art, which has allowed me to to work in either style and sometimes fuse the two. These differing styles have crossed over, my painting Wedding Dance is a good example of the fusion of the two styles.

As a youngster I began to copy cartoon characters from comic books, I got bored with these characters and I began to draw my own cartoons. As a teenager in high school I drew cartoons associated with the car culture of that time such as the Rat Fink cartoons. (Rat Fink was developed as a logo by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, a popular car customizer of that time. Rat Fink was sort of a counterculture slam at Mickey Mouse).

My friends and I could not afford customized cars but we could look at hot rod magazines and dream of them and I could surely draw them. I began to put comical characters in those cars and my friends started asking me to draw them and put them in those cars. I drew many dragsters and funny cars with my friends at the wheel. Then a classmate came to me and asked me to draw a caricature of a particular high school bully getting his butt kicked, I did. For several weeks after I drew the cartoon I was a marked man and and had to lay low for a while.

During the summer of 1968 I got a student job working at the International Institute in Boyle Heights California as an instructor for the children's art program. While working at the institute I met a man by the name of Tony Gomez who was the supervisor of the summer program at the Institute. After several weeks at the institute Tony showed me a small magazine and said he and his friends self published it. He explained to me that it was a literary social political magazine that reflected life and experiences in the barrios of the southwest. He gave me a copy and asked me to look it over and give him my impression of the magazine. In typical teenage fashion I tossed the magazine in my car and didn't give it another thought.

A week later Tony asked me what I thought of the magazine and I was too embarrassed to tell him that I had not even looked at it. He asked me if I would like to draw for the mag and I gave a halfhearted yes. My association with Con Safos started hesitantly but soon blossomed into full fledged participation. The men involved in the magazine were mentors, big brothers so to speak who helped me develop my political consciousness. I soon drew political cartoons, developed a cartoon strip named Arni & Porfi, and illustrated stories for the magazine. It was a defining part of my life and career which gave me a push in the direction I'm at today.