I pretty much wake up everyday and seriously think to myself, “what can I do today the a normal everyday person would probably never do or even see the beauty in? Where can I find beauty, where normally there is none?”
I can see the beauty of art in anything and everything, and today all I wanted to do was grab some paint pens, head to the tracks and work on some graffiti and then spend the day wandering along this creek in the woods, searching for the skull of this raccoon I saw a few weeks before that I had wanted to draw.
The moment I stepped outside to head to the tracks, I could feel this day had the makings of an adventure. As I hiked down the tracks to “the spot” I felt a deja vu of sorts taking me back to when I was child, growing up with my huge family in the rural farmlands of Ohioville, PA, and pretty much living outdoors, no matter the weather.
My brother and sisters and I would literally go outside to play in the woods and fields at 9 am and not come home until dusk, unless it was to eat or go to the bathroom, sometimes not even then.
I was never considered a “normal” kid, that’s why I am so okay with being considered so different now, even though I see myself as a perfectly normal guy living in a flawed society.
I never did well with authority, I established this as a child, and thus I was home schooled from 5th grade on. Everything that I have learned from fifth grade on I essentially taught myself, or have learned through observation/apprenticeships. I observe, I read, I listen, and I challenge myself daily and I’ve done this since I was a child; this is how I learn.
Ever since I was a child I have had this obsession with collecting things from nature or things that I have come across in my life that I deemed an oddity.
I have been scoping out this dead beaver I had found weeks earlier laying next to the creek. I was waiting for it to decay all the way so I could grab it’s skull and use it as an art reference. Sure, it might be strange to some bringing skulls of dead animals home, but there is nothing like drawing from the real thing and I clean them thoroughly.
When I got to the spot where the beaver had been it appeared that some animal had run off with the carcass, bummed out I decided that I would just walk further into the woods and see if I could find a road to head home.
I finally got to the tracks, where the tracks and lo’ and behold, a fully decayed bleached skeleton of a deer, laying right next to the tracks.
Score. I totally grabbed a few cool bones and the skull and threw them in a bag in my backpack, stay tuned for the awesome sketches I’m gonna come up with after I clean them up.
What I’m trying to say is, I’m glad that I can still entertain myself the same way that I did 13 years ago. Sure I might have grown physically, but it’s nice to know that after all I have been through in my life, I am still the same kid I was when I was 13 spending his days drawing and wandering around in the woods.

I took some cool pictures during the day, including these random bike frames I found in the middle of nowhere, someone would’ve had to rode these 20 minutes into the woods and left them, so strange.