About:

Hometown: Washington, DC

Lived: Montana, New Mexico, Oregon

Now Living: Portland, OR; since 2003

Employment: Artist; Director of non-profit, Portland City Art

Artist Statement



"I am inspired from looking out my window and seeing a grey squirrel eating a banana peel mayonnaise torpedo on a neighbors front porch with a tow truck on fire across the street. I am inspired from reading the daily news and then talking to people on the corner and getting the other daily news from the streets.

I use Sumi ink, spray paint, oil stick, and acrylic for mediums, and paint almost exclusively on recycled doors or scraps of wood. My signature squiggly lines come from outer space. It's alien graffiti language I guess. It came to me one night six years ago in New Mexico while wildin' out on a twenty foot charcoal and paper mural. The titles of these painting are their primary purpose. The actual painting comes second.

 I also use found objects or recycled trash to create 3-D Dadaist combines and political, social, cultural or spontaneous reflections about this most insane, beautiful,  and fiendish world.

I love intangible, split-second moments in time, the ones which are forgotten, dismissed, or overlooked because they are too immediately abstract or absurd. ie: seeing some guy crossing the street and suddenly realizing that i want to bite a brick for ten hours straight while Linda Rhonstat belches constantly in a d minor tremelo to Roy Nagin whose on his knees, dressing red ants for the highschool prom. I try to express these moments in my art. I add humor  and absurdity to make sense out of and address such issues.

Inspiration: Dada, punk rock, 1970's NY subway walls, street art and graff, taoism, old vinyl jazz and hip-hop, honky-tonkin' and old country, love and sex, old typewriters, old leather briefcases, 80'd pop-culture, polotikin' coffee and frieks in creeks.
Thanks!
JG



"every night is some experience
out of a draught style of subordinate nolan ryan
microbial plastic ware;
when you take a dumpy dumper
in the public park
behind my house
it really
turns me on and gets me going:
you are so bleached out and yee-haw
sweet,
there is no way to saw directly
through a cashiers check
no matter the number of swine,
no matter
your corvette h'ourderve in the caspian sea."
-ancient dada proverb"