Origins of FACE

Whenever I was initially creating FACE, it started in high school. Cause I found this one skeleton head drawing and I couldn't like, copy it. Cause then now I'd just be like not being an artist. Right. So I took it to my art teacher and I was like, how do I make this my own? Like, how do I separate myself from this drawing that I really liked?

I, I didn't know what part of it. I liked the most because I like the whole thing. that's where the birth of this idea of representing myself through a logo started. So that's kind of thе origin of face, but then, you know, many years latеr, whenever I was in my first internship in college, I basically was going around fixing all the machines and stuff in this like a giant industrial warehouse.

But I was also the intern, so they made me like, go check fire extinguishers. It was a huge warehouse. So I would spend all day checking, fire extinguishers. Whenever I walked around all of our like intake boxes had the Oxo on them because that was like the brand of the kitchenware company that was being shipped through this warehouse.

I just started drawing little mountains on them. And there there's a bunch of different mounds, but this, this one particular mouth I was doing, it actually started off as a circle with like teeth inside of it. And then I got quicker and quicker with it. Whenever I went to Memphis, I started learning about street art and how street artists have tags and things like that, which furthered kind of this notion representing myself through a logo.

There were tons and tons of these boxes. And on some boxes, I wouldn't even just draw full skeletons. I would draw whole humans and I did a lot of, a lot of drawing on these boxes whenever I was working there, but I wanted a sticker.

I wanted to have a sticker to like stick everywhere. So I know I needed to really figure out how to do this, representing myself through an image, an image that could be, um, manipulated and duplicated, not necessarily. Like, cause I could've made a sticker. That was like a, like a character, but I want something like one uniform thing.

That's whenever I started my stickers. Cause I, I did this tag, this Oxo, this one particular mouth on a canvas and that canvas got like painted over. Like it doesn't like it's not even a thing anymore. Like at the time it did not matter. I was just like, I'm going to. Take a picture of this and I'm going to use this image because then I represented at the time kind of my workplace, but also this desire for creative freedom.

It became aware to me that people were starting to be aware that it was me. And so I do that was like a really cool, cool part of like this, this logo mentality. Was it because it was like, okay, like I'm conveying this message of who I am. And people are recognizing that this is me. That's why it was kind of why I really liked the stickers.

It took like four or five years, maybe six, if you count that one conversation I had with my art teacher.