Jan the Voyager

FINAL 📸 shots are in!! This wraps up my recent work at Wauwatosa East (aka Tosa East), where I spent my formative years, graduating in 2007 🥹
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I worked with Craig from to make this project happen, and it was so cool how it came about. He saw me working on another local mural with last summer, and that’s when we got the ball rolling. In my work, I like to share visuals of people doing the best they can at their craft, weather that’s cycling, hiking, climbing, driving, skateboarding, honestly even just living peacefully, I like to depict people in their own space, investigating their interests. This worked out really well in this case, because Craig has worked to develop a platform for kids at East to pursue interests outside of “typical academic study”. Want to be an engineer? There are skills you can build for that. Want to lay tile? There’s a skill for that too. Matter of fact, if you want to be more handy in your life, but not necessarily work in a labor field, there’s education for that as well! So with all that said, it gave me a great opportunity to work with figure as I like to do, and to highlight people trying their strength, but also trying their mind and skills in a physical space. So I’d say a big thanks goes to Craig, and for providing funding needed to make this happen.
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Very funny to be working at my old school. I was so worried and unsure when I graduated, and I had spent years struggling to keep up with assignments, to the point where I felt I had limited my options for when I graduated. I went into the arts fully not trusting the process, and not seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel” of education, but after years now of working in the public arts, over a decade after college and almost 2 decades since high school, it’s a treat to come back and know that somehow, some way, I’ve carved out a space for myself in this working world, and how funny is it that the space I carved is painting things on walls and making people smile. Wish I could go back and tell little Jan that drawing on his grandparents walls would work out in the end😂