How has your exposure to skateboarding influenced your work as an artist?
The culture, people and specifically the artists within skating have 100% influenced me. Ed Templeton, Michael Sieben, Todd Francis, BB Bastidas, to name a few. I’ve always admired their creativity and their approach to being an artist. I try to catch interviews with them in magazines or online. I’ll watch them again from time to time to remind myself to keep pushing. Anyone who is unapologetically themselves, I find really motivating. It’s hard to make a career out of your artwork. You have to deal with a lot, and then sometimes that doesn’t always go away. I’ve always likened it to when you’ve been trying to land a trick for ages and keep stacking, but you keep getting up and trying again until you get it. That takes a certain amount of grit and determination, and I feel like sometimes you need that to be a commercial artist.