Since you've got a major museum show coming up, 43,000 Limbs-The Art and Life of Andy Howell, I thought we could start simply with this question Ð What's your favorite museum?

AH - I like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MOCA in LA, all the Paris Museums. I recently saw a Calder exhibit there I was really stoked on. I try and hit museums in all the cities that I go. What else is happening that's been good, I just went to a Seattle museum, just last month. Seattle Museum is split into I think two or three different parts and we went to, my wife is Chinese, so we went to the Chinese part of that museum. It was just amazing. I am really inspired by the line quality, and of course the traditional calligraphy, that's always something Chinese museums will show a lot of. They had a lot of the modern painters and contemporary artists, who are coming out now, and some who have been working in hiding for 20 to 30 years making incredible art, and it was really inspiring to see how people take that traditional education of calligraphy and turn it into a graphic line.

You seem to be influenced not just by fine arts, but by traditional crafts as well.

AH - I grew up in Virginia, and the area around where my family comes from had a number of different Chesapeake Bay Indian tribes and Native American tribes. I found arrowheads and stuff. I was also adopted, and my family had really light skin, I had really light skin, I always used to make believe I was from one of those native tribes in the area. That's kind of stuck with me, I was always very interested in anything that was a Native American craft, or when I've gone to other countries seeing the native art from there. I really like the Northwestern art, that is also like how folk art, American folk art, is the white Europeans coming to America's version of that native art. I actually love all the southern artists that were doing that kind of folk art. Howard Finster, we actually have one of his pieces at our house. I went to his place when I was living in Atlanta and saw the garden and everything he made, so I've been really turned on by artists that are using feeling, the materials their finding and create their own graphic imagery. The line quality that comes from the Native Americans of the Northwest part of the US, especially Oregon and Washington, have just got amazing qualities.

Some of the recent stuff I've been doing, integrating a childhood of cartoons and graphics and animation and everything I grew up with being plopped in front of the TV as a kid and watching the movement of all the famous characters, I grew up on that. Then when I got into the graffiti aesthetic, and also the twisting of comic book art for graphic novels and adult comics, that really put a little fire into my ass and I took that inspiration, along with traditional art education from the art institute down there, and came up with what I think is the genesis of a lot of the comic inspired and graffiti inspired skate graphics that came in the early Ô90s. I may have been one of the first people to do that. So that graphic style became a icon for a lot of people who were creative and also into activities like skateboarding and snowboarding, and that sparked a whole bunch of artists and a generation was brought up on that kind of graphic line aesthetic. HS: Do you think growing up near DC gave you a lot of balance, in terms of searching for the Native American roots on one hand, and on the other the hardcore scene and other urban arts? Balance between the new urban and a more historically minded childhood.