For the last decade Optimist has been deftly navigating urban street art culture and the commercial art world. Born in San Francisco and raised in Oakland, Optimist’s work reflects the ethos of these vibrant cultural pillars of the Bay Area. As a youth, Optimist’s initial love of drawing and illustration led his obsession with mark making onto other forms and surfaces, namely the surrounding urban environment. The Bay Area, with its history of progressivism, experimentation, invention and social activism provided a fertile environment in which Optimist took inspiration. While attending San Francisco State University Optimist became entrenched in the local graffiti scene and also discovered another love—painting. While exploring the two artistic mediums of both painting and graffiti Optimist learned that each brought with it different creative personas complete with different subcultures and lifestyles. He soon realized that the confluence of these creative personas of aspiring studio artist/academic and graffiti artist were conflicting yet also too compelling to ignore. While Optimist maintains that his paintings—controlled, studied, thoughtful, almost faithful in their near-photographic representation as if to glorify the mundane and familiar subject matter—are fundamentally distanced from the extemporaneous, hyper-stylized, flamboyant character of his graffiti, it is undeniable that each medium lends to the other a unique visual lexicon. This effortless repartee between the cerebral and the visceral is what gives a particular authenticity to Optimist’s paintings.

Living in Taipei, Taiwan from 2007-2009 gave Optimist the international counterpoint with which to further explore his conflicting emotions about urban culture’s evolving role in modernization. While exploring another thriving metropolis whose rules were being written anew, he painted daily and immersed himself in the study of Chinese languages and culture. As his appreciation for the richness of Chinese culture deepened, Optimist observed that there was a current trend in Taiwan of eschewing these traditional values in favor of twenty-first century hyper-consumerist values. This observation was the impetus behind Optimist’s most recent series of paintings Man, Animal and the Machines. In these works, endangered species converge with hollowed carcasses of modernity. The figure of a graffiti writer, back turned to the viewer, sprays a defiant salvo of spray paint into oblivion while exalted over a police car. Trains, planes and automobiles appear to hurtle away from each other towards an undetermined destination—is it a promising future or an apocalyptic demise? In the midst of all this action, Optimist has managed to establish a haunting sense of serenity, a prescient perspective or perhaps a form of surrender to that which haunts us as a species—that which we are constantly trying to distance ourselves from. His compositions, while fraught with a subtle tension, evoke an unexpected sense of balance with stoic animals taking on hierarchical or almost mythical proportions next to the people and commonplace urban infrastructure. The animals seem to represent a pure conscience and a reverting to simpler truth in the face of our race towards materialism and environmental degradation. The seeming tranquility of the animals in the face of all this tumult is soothing and strangely hopeful.

Through his paintings Optimist is imagining an urban environments untarnished by the recent preoccupation with striving to become homogenized, accommodating, ‘world class’. His paintings glorify the urbanscape as much as they provide a social commentary. Before our aspirations of consuming, striving, paving, buffing, gentrifying and confining there was man and the streets. Optimist’s works suggest that perhaps the urban environment is our new natural environment with unique attributes that should be protected accordingly. Optimist’s canny choice of imagery and urban symbols are rooted in both local pride and an appreciation of international urban culture sparking a united sense of the underground in us all.