AH - Did you say suburban minded?
No, I said historically minded.
AH - I mean, I wouldn’t say I was really historically minded. I just loved the idea of the way Native Americans lived and the free environment, and it was all around me as a kid. I was living in a fantasy land, incorporating that into my imagination. When I got to be about 13 or 14, I found skateboarding. Along with that came Thrasher Magazine, the elements of Thrasher were really punk charged at that time. I was actually in Virginia Beach, so I was really close to DC and the punk scene that came out of DC, also Richmond and North Carolina; from Bad Brains to Corrosion of Conformity. The influence I got from that was, and during that same time that I found skating I was pushing into this dark world a little bit, so I had the outcast artist plus the completely outcast skater, which at that time was not even understood. People would literally jump out the way if you came gliding down the sidewalk on a skateboard. But, I combined that together with punk music, at least in the beginning before hip-hop music came in punk music was the theme song of the beginnings of a skateboarders life. “Fuck the system,” etc., was pretty much if we could have had tattoos at 13 years old, that’s what we would have had tattooed on our arms.
Are you influenced by tattoo art?
AH - I am not heavily influenced by it. I love the graphic line of people like Mike Giant, who’s a little bit influenced by graffiti at the same time. I don’t follow tattoo art, per say, but sometimes my art has been used for tattoos, so there has got to be some kind of connection.
AH - I want to talk a little about the coming up with an outsider perspective towards and then progressing to doing graphic design and art direction for some pretty mainstream entities.
AH - Yeah, that’s a big question actually. The shortest, and most direct, answer is as a kid I was an artist making Xerox posters for all my buddies that had punk bands and drawing their album covers and making them on a friends parents Xerox machine at their office, pre-kinkos, I was also trying to get up in some way. Making my own skate ‘zines taught me that I could do, in this DIY culture that was being formed at the time, that I could do anything that I wanted to do. I could do a magazine, my own screen printing. My mom got me a screen print kit, and I could make tee shirts at 14 years old. Pretty early on, I had the feeling that I could do anything. Later, I went to art school in Atlanta, where I found hip-hop music and graffiti, and really became interested in the idea of getting up and getting over, putting tags everywhere. When I turned pro and started New Deal, and later Element, the graphics and stuff that I did a lot of times I would paint on walls before hand, really big. Going out at night and bombing. One of the places… the idea was just getting up. When I started the skate company, suddenly I was getting up to thousands of kids with whatever sticker I wanted to make, with whatever t-shirt, catalog, skate graphic. Oh, I think will make jeans, I made the first baggy jeans for skate kids. I kind of got this empowered feeling that anything at all was possible as long as I followed what my inspiration was. Later, that opened up when I created an agency that was based around the youth culture of action sports and music, and that lifestyle called Image Works, which I stared with my partner Greg Deleao, the founder of Forum Snowboards and Division 23. We got together and decided, with the onset of the X-Games, everyone’s going to do what they always did, big companies are going to try and come in and sprinkle some money in and if its done in a bad way its going to make action sports and the lifestyle look stupid. It’s going to become lame again like it did in the late ‘70s and parts of the early ‘80s. So, that kind of opened up the doors for me to do all sorts of different projects.
