I grew up in Brighton, on the reservation in Florida, right outside Okeechobee. Woods and dirt roads and pastures. Rodeo, trucks, four-wheelers, mudding. That was my whole world until I was fourteen and we moved to Sarasota, and then it was concrete and asphalt. I think both of those are still in what I make.

My grandma was always doing something with beads, for as long as I've known her. My mom was always creating, always onto the next project. So I grew up around people making things with their hands. My dad was an artist too, but I only met him twice. Once when I was about five, out in Oklahoma, and once when I was eighteen for maybe a week. I saw some of his art. I didn't think much of it back then. I do now.

The letters started when I was a teenager. I'd draw names, draw words, practice my cursive. Nobody asked me to. I just liked the way they looked.

I started really drawing at twenty, when I went to jail. I did two years. Sitting in a cell I'd practice names, try different backgrounds, try to find a way to make it look different than everybody else. I got commissions in there, jail commissions, for chips or noodles or a breakfast tray. Guys wanted clocks, smoke, a date, a quote. Things for their girlfriends. Clouds and hearts and butterflies for their kids.

The art in there is a big part of why I do this. What people make with what they have, with tools they built themselves, it's unbelievable. I'm still influenced by it.

When I got out I started following Big Sleeps, Flaks, Norm, Huero, Sir Twice, Calhoun. What got me was the strength of it and how authentic it was. Big graffiti-style letters that look like they belong on a wall, but they're on somebody's skin, and it looks like they were always supposed to be there. That's when I understood lettering was its own whole thing, and these guys were carrying it forward.

I wanted to tattoo but everybody told me the same thing. Don't let anybody apprentice you unless they've been at it ten years or more. I didn't know anybody like that. So I floated for about eight years. I'd make art here and there but never like it was going to be anything.

At twenty-nine I finally just ordered a cheap machine off Amazon and started practicing on fruit and fake skin. Less than a month in, people were asking me for tattoos. I told them I was still practicing and they said they didn't care. That's when everything started to make sense. The letters, the art, all of it came together once I picked up the machine.

The hard part about lettering that people don't see is staying original while still following the laws of it. There's structure you have to respect or it stops being legible. But you don't want to make what everybody else is making. That's the whole struggle.

Balance and structure are the first things I look at. How wide are the letters spaced. Where are they thick, where are they thin. When I need a reference I'll look up Old English, but I never look up a specific artist's version, because then you're just copying somebody. I only need the baseline. Diagonal, swoop, diagonal, pulldown. It's simple until it isn't.

The word I come back to is love. The letter L. I don't know what it is, it just flows so clean in cursive. It's the most practiced letter and the most practiced word I have.

When nobody's asking me for anything, I draw angels. Angel faces, praying hands. I work on the shading, on getting the hands right. Everything starts in pencil, goes to ink, and sometimes gets spray painted depending on the piece. A painting might take me a week. A bigger one, a month or two. I've got one I've been working on for over a year. I'm not in a rush with that one.