About

"Mississippi? What are you doing all the way up here?"

Honestly? Following the art. Apparently the art likes snow.

Mississippi. Alabama. Texas. Minnesota.

My mom was a young honor student with a baby in her arms and a college schedule to keep. Long before my dad came into the picture, she was the blueprint. In our house, "we can't" wasn't a sentence. If she said we were going, we went. If she said it would get done, it got done. Nothing was handed to us. She built it, and she made sure we felt every bit of the reward.

That's where I come from: a woman who believed in her kids louder than the world doubted them.

So I never followed the crowd. Once my mind is made up, you can't talk me out of it. I know what I want, and I go get it, however long it takes.

It started the day I watched my older brother make a piece of art. Something lit up in me. My parents told me to keep going, so I did, and the more I made, the more people showed up to push me forward.

I drew all through grade school. I entered competitions straight through senior year, and my work hung in museums and libraries around Dallas. My mom had one rule: education first. Nothing else came close. She backed my art all the way, but she knew that without that diploma, I'd have nowhere to go.

I graduated from McKinney-Boyd and picked up a welding torch, and I treated it like a brush, not just a trade. Welding started my adult life. It carried me through trade school and onto the railroad as a machinist at CPKC.

I've been in Minnesota four years now. Second shift means long afternoons that run until midnight, and I come home late. My partner carries the weight of those hours with me every night, and she never lets go.

Then COVID put everything on pause. I made some of my best work in that silence, and nobody saw it outside a few scrolls on social media. I'd been hiding the art, and myself along with it.

There were days I wanted to quit. Every time, I told myself the same thing: I want to see where this leads.

IKB stands for I Keep Believing. It's been brewing since high school. It's black and white on the outside and chaos underneath, because that's what people are. Some of my pieces look like nonsense until they hit, and life works the same way. Yes, there's a unicorn box farting rainbows. No, I won't explain it. Yes, it means something.

That's the thing: it's all expression. This isn't just something that looks cool, like a tattoo or a sticker. Every character carries a story. Some are funny. Some are clever. Some show the sad side, but they still show real life instead of lying about it.

Take Ramen Man. Somebody stole his noodles and ate them right in front of him. Disrespectful. But look at him, dripped out head to toe, clean as ever. Disrespect him all you want, he's still going to thrive and do him.

Some pieces talk louder than others, but they all have something to say. Keep believing. Keep thriving. Don't give up on what you set your mind to.

IKB is me, but it's bigger than me. It's all of us, stuck in the box, doing what we're told, clocking in, keeping quiet, playing it safe. Meanwhile there's color inside you that's never been let out, a roaring lion pacing a cage. IKB is the crack in the bars.

I don't color inside the lines. I never have. No rules.

Every artist out there is fighting for a name. We sacrifice comfort, sleep, and sometimes everything else, just to get the work seen. Some of us turn the living room into a studio. Some are sleeping outside right now, still sketching, still hoping. That says something. We take a world that's already beautiful and keep pouring what we see onto anything we can touch.

The funky stuff, the odd stuff, the things people call weird, should be out loud and on display. It's okay to be weird. It's okay to be the different one in the group. It's okay to not follow the group. It's okay to be the black sheep.

This is for the misfits. It's for the ones who moved too much, worked too late, and got told to tone it down. You're not too much. You're just early.

I'm not a starving artist hungry for talent. I'm hungry for a shot. I've got a whole world of ideas waiting to come out, and when you wear this, you're helping me bring it to life.

The odd ones outlast.

I'm not done yet.

The unspoken people are louder than you think. They're here, just like me, and I'm one of them.

– Ian