RafaelFajardo

If big, elaborate paintings (and reproductions thereof) are something that everyone can enjoy, why should the only people funding them be the rich collectors who can buy them outright? If the tastes of rich collectors dictate what sort of art gets made and acknowledged, isn’t that pretty limiting for everyone? Plus, galleries scared me. I was the dropout of a rather cruddy state school. I had a past as a fetish model. I didn’t dress right or talk right or have the right degrees. Academic art writing made me squirm. Worse, I worked as an illustrator, which in the mainstream art world was like a neon stamp of “Not Legit” on my forehead. So I found myself with fourteen thousand twitter followers and a brain punch-drunk on ideas that I wanted to express while they were still relevant. The snot-nosed punk kid inside of me said this: Fuck it. Stop asking for permission. Do it yourself.