Big Time Questions No.3

What made you decide to go to Savannah College of Art and Design?

Ah the Savannah decision is an interesting one. Honestly I was lured in by that idea of the "art industry." I had always planned on going to the big state school where I'm from (IU, Indiana), to do what, I have no idea, but just assumed I would go there. One day a pamphlet from SCAD showed up in my mail and that was that. Their facilities looked amazing. At the time I didn't even know you could go to school for stuff like animation, and illustration. I didn't even really think much of art in high-school. I drew all the time when I was bored in class, and did very well in my art classes, but I thought character design for movies, or video games or something was where it was at. You know, I wanted to do something "cool". So I shipped off to Savannah (thankfully! everyone else I knew ended up at IU, and I have Savannah to thank for getting me the hell out of Indiana if nothing else). I wanted to pursue illustration, via animation, and do concept art. I did quite well, but my entire idea about what I wanted to do with myself, and what I felt art was changed about halfway through school. I hate to give any one thing this much credit, but I think a lot of it has to do with reading this book called Pranks by this publishing company called RE/Search (who I went out and worked for for a summer in San Francisco) at this particular time in my life. It's this incredible book that is just a collection of interviews with all these amazing artists, musicians, and creative people, that express their ideas through creative pranksterism. People like: Joey Skaggs, Joe Coleman, Boyd Rice, Jeffrey Vallance, Mark Pauline, Paul Krassner, Mal Sharpe, Abbie Hoffman, Jello Biafra. You know, mostly people no normal person has ever heard of. It completely blew open my eyes to this whole other way of doing things. I had actually had the book for years. My older cousin had gotten it for me in the throes of my hardcore punk youth. I read the Biafra and Rollins interviews, and that was pretty much that. I really think that certain things work at certain times of your life. That book worked when I read it. I don't think I had any frame of experience to put it into when I was younger. It's like when you hear certain bands for the first time and you just don't get it. And then you hear them again years down the road, and those sounds have been bouncing around and multiplying in your head for those years and they suddenly sound like the most brilliant music you've ever heard; like the kind of sounds you've been waiting your whole life for. It's the same reason that if you don't read Catcher in the Rye when you're a teenager, I don't think you can really read it. It stops working past a certain point. I read Pranks at the right time, and I lost all sight of everything I had wanted to do previously. I broke up with my girlfriend who I had been with for a year and a half at that point, and the world seemed like a different place. I stuck it through school because I knew that they weren't teaching anything that I wanted to learn in any school, and it was too late to really switch majors ( to Art History), so I just stuck with animation. They didn't really know what to make of me, so we kind of left each other alone. I did all these weird projects that the professors shrugged off, and was left pretty much to my own devices. Somehow I actually graduated cum laude despite the fact that for the last two years school was only taking up about 10-15% of my energy.