I never really felt like myself until I started skateboarding and listening to punk rock. A latchkey kid, I grew up on the sidewalks of sunny Southern California. Disaffected. I felt like the kid on the cover of Bad Religion’s Suffer album. Then an issue of Thrasher magazine showed up at school one day, and we all went nuts. Here was a subculture of outcasts making their own world on the streets. I felt like I’d found my people – this was home. Skateboarding led to punk rock and, believe it or not, punk rock led to art.

I was 19, wasting my life playing bass guitar in a garage punk rock band, going to college part time. Really all I cared about was music and skateboarding. But I took an art history course at my shitty local college and the professor of that class blew my mind. He made the boring art I’d seen before vibrant and exciting. He stomped around the classroom shouting, shaking his fists, spit flying from his mouth: “CARVAGGIO! FAN VAULTING! GOTHIC SPIRES POINTING UP TO GOD!”

He had one of those old carousel slide projectors packed with slides of art from throughout history, and every one contained a fascinating story. He loved art but wasn’t precious about it. Art was for everyone. And everyone should love it. And because he loved it, and showed us how to think about it, I loved it. He explained how Jackson Pollock’s paintings were static representations of violent movement. How Cubism was art trying to speak in three dimensions. It opened my mind. It was Good Will Hunting, but with paintings and architecture instead of poetry.

Our class went on a field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to see the wide world that art had to offer. Masterpieces that I’d seen in textbooks, modern art that I rolled my eyes at and some weird tower of TV sets all turned to different channels of static or playing looped videotapes. When you looked at the tower from the back of the room, it made out the American flag. It was cool.

My friend Derrick and I added another stop at the Museum of Contemporary Art before our drive home. “Let’s see some way-out new shit from some emerging artists,” we said. The show was called “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” and its description said the works “share a common vision in which alienation, dispossession, perversity, sex and violence either dominate the landscape or form disruptive undercurrents.” Sounds like L.A. in the ’90s.

Anyway, we were working our way through the show, and after seeing so many works of art all day long I felt numb. Just brain-dead art-numb. But then we walked into a room full of ink-painted images that looked familiar. “I know that artist! What the hell? Where do I recognize that from?” I knew it from punk rock. From Black Flag flyers. From a Sonic Youth album cover. “Wait, who is this?” The label read Raymond Pettibon. “Who’s Raymond Pettibon?” I went home and looked at my Black Flag and Sonic Youth albums. “Yep, that’s him.” The guy from the punk rock flyers was in an art museum. Holy hell.

That’s the moment it all came together for me: skateboarding, punk rock and art – street art. Back then, we called it graffiti, and a lot of it still is, but you gotta start somewhere. And it started with graffiti. Anyway, now we call it street art.

There’s a long tradition of visual art in skateboarding. So many skaters I grew up with are amazing painters or photographers or people who draw or weirdos who were editing together skate videos well beyond what people thought a skate video could be. It was the same with punk rock – we used to draw our own t-shirt designs and pull our own silkscreens. Cobble together flyers for our shows in the midnight hours at our local Kinkos. We had no label or support, so we just did it ourselves. I feel like street art has the same core. Same with punk rock and hip hop – the left out and overlooked making their own reality. Just make it yourself. Just go make art. It’s the same spirit. And I’ve loved art, especially street art, ever since.

I’ve loved watching the interest in and legitimacy of street art increase over the years. I felt like our worlds were on the come up. The losers were winning. Punk rock climbed the charts and took over the world. Skateboarding is now everywhere. We used to get rocks thrown at us, and now it’s an Olympic sport. You kept us out and now here we are. I love it.

In 2011, my wife and I moved our family to London. We wanted our son to grow up with a wide view of the world, and London was a great home base for a few years. Before we left L.A., we all went to a graffiti show called “Art in the Streets,” once again at MOCA. But this time, the exhibition took up the whole museum – I mean, they dedicated an entire museum to street art.

Shepard Fairey and Kenny Scharf and Ed Templeton and TAKI 183 and JR and Revok and Space Invader – the place was packed. Lines around the block to get in. Holy shit, it’s real. Street art is real art. And people I knew were in the show! Street photographer Estevan Oriol, who took promo photos of blink-182, was in it. So was Mister Cartoon, who tattooed Travis Barker and me. Our contemporaries were hanging in legitimate art museums. Then we turned a corner and saw Banksy’s installation, and I stopped dead.

I love Banksy’s art. The subversion, the humor, the intelligence, the fuck you. We spent what was probably longer than our fair turn in the space, walking and looking and contemplating. Trying to interpret what we saw and asking our son what he thought. It was great. Core memory stuff.

So off we move to London, knowing nary a soul, but excited for the adventure. Soon afterward, we found ourselves at an art opening – cool and inspiring art by a bunch of up-and-coming artists – where we saw this work that was called Crude Oil (Vettriano). By this point, Banksy’s name was well established. We’d all heard and read about the show in Los Angeles with the painted elephant, where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie walked away with the most coveted pieces. We loved this painting the moment we saw it. Unmistakably Banksy, but different. Not a screened image; an actual painting of a composition I knew. But from where? I know this from something. Aren’t those people supposed to be dancing? Yeah. They’re dressed all fancy and dancing, right? I asked the gallery person. Yes, that’s Jack Vettriano’s Dancing Butler.

The piece was out of our price range, but we bought it because we loved it. Since then, it’s borne witness to our family over these past dozen years. In London, it hung over the table where we ate breakfast and our son did his homework. In Los Angeles, it hung in our living room. It’s seen laughter and tears and parties and arguments. Our son has grown up in front of it. It has also borne witness to soccer balls being kicked far too close, and half-drunk friends leaning an eye-lash’s length away with a glass full of wine to ask, suspiciously, “Is this really a Banksy?” Or, “Can they touch it?”

After an insurance appraisal revealed the painting’s full value, we became more protective of its well-being. Not, like, Smeagol with his Precious ring protective, but, like, “Hey man, why don’t you take the cigar outside, please.”

To defend and preserve our dear Precious, I mean Crude Oil (Vetriano), we hired a professional art-storage company to box it up safely and store it in a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style warehouse in some inconspicuous, secure facility in the greater Los Angeles area. But that’s not what this painting deserves. It should be seen and appreciated and celebrated, and it should bring joy and anger, hope and skepticism, to everyone who has the opportunity to see it.

So last year we decided to set it free from its wooden crate. To let it live where it was always meant to live: Hanging over some crypto billionaire’s toilet.

For real, though, this painting has meant so much to us and been such an amazing part of our lives. I’m excited for it to be out there in the world, seen by as many people as possible. Go get ‘em, Crude Oil. Godspeed.

Coming back to punk rock, where it all began, one aspect of the community I always hold dear is the idea that if you get lucky enough to gain success, you bring your friends with you. Larger bands bring smaller bands on tour. We support one another from within. I want to take some of the money from the sale of this painting and use it to buy works from younger, upcoming artists. We were lucky enough to find Crude Oil in our lives, and it’ll help us support more art and artists. I want to be a punk Medici.

We also want to support two charities dear to our hearts: Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and their Child Life Program, and hematology and oncology research at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Finally, in light of the recent devastation in our home city of Los Angeles, we want to continue our donations to the California Fire Foundation.

Past Auction

Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction

4 March 2025 | 7:00 PM GMT | London