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MD: Are there any artists that inspire you?
VCJ: If my work inspires skateboarders then that’s fine, but I’m not a skateboarder. I just know that there’s a lot of artists out there
that really enjoy black and white drawing. The binary system of black and white. To all those out there that are involved with the true value of
black and the true value of white I say "I wish you all the highest fulfillment and a pleasant midnight groove" cuz it’s a big reason why
electric lighting was invented… It was for people to stay up late at night and let something blossom before their eyes.
MD: So does colour then detract from the final image for you? Do you prefer things be black and white?
VCJ: You still have a burger without the special sauce. The bun and the burger are the essential parts. The special sauce doesn’t really matter.
Things get re-printed over and over with different special sauces but the black and white work is something that is seen by other artists as worthy of
study.
MD: With Mike Vallely he had the elephant graphic, but before that was the intention to use the cockroach graphic. Were you disappointed at all that he rejected it?
VCJ: Not at all. Not at all. I was near the end of a phase of expression at that point in my life and the company allowed me to work with scratch
board for his idea. I really liked the effects I got out of that design.
MD: The insect or the elephant?
VCJ: Both of them. I was so glad to have access to scratch board. The ability to work on a white surface adding AND subtracting ink from that white surface.
MD: Is that still your preferred medium?
VCJ: Even if I do an ink drawing I’ll still work on scratch board because you don’t have to use white out then. White-out over time will yellow.
MD: What are you working on right now?
VCJ: It’s on the board [behind us]. It’s a company logo dragon. We were joking the other day in design group when I said "We’re a dragon factory
aren’t we?" Next year is the year of the dragon or something? And what is a dragon? It is a symbol of something that cannot be conquered.
Dragons don’t exist in such a way that a human can engage them directly. A hurricane is something that you are powerless to deal with.
An earthquake; we are powerless to deal with. Lightning and tornadoes… we’re absolutely powerless to deal with them. So they represent immutable
power in a way that fascinates humans.
But also the dragon symbolizes the individual soul and the way it blazes it’s way absolutely through every life and how every soul has
to live a COMPLETE series of lives and no soul gets out of the process of the complete series of lives towards graduation. It eventually graduates.
The soul never dies. So the dragon is a beautiful symbol of a soul that dies a thousand times before it graduates.
MD: So that’s a good reflection of what the appeal of that kind of imagery would have for you to be working on. When you talk about the inner person,
do you think that it’s a concrete way of saying that that’s where the skeleton and skull imagery comes from… that it’s a reflection of what’s on the
inside?
VCJ: Without bones we’d all be bags of jelly and there are life forms that don’t have bones and it’s a good life for them but… humans and cetaceans,
or dolphins and whales, have large skulls and large brains and individual souls appointed to them. Cetaceans use reason. We use reason. They have
culture like we have culture they have language like ours but they don’t have hands.
The planet was all set up as a campus so that 2 large brained individually ensouled beings could learn a series of lessons. The skull
of the cetacean or the human skull both represent large brained ensouled creatures who are at this point in history are about to start talking to each
other. There’ll be an electronic interface invented so that the dolphins can talk with us within our hearing range. We’ll invent it and they will begin
to be understood for the first time.
MD: Whether they chose to speak to us though is another issue...
VCJ: Oh they will. They know that we’ve ceased hunting whales. 60 years in Santa Barbara and only in the last 10 years have I even seen them.
There’s a large incidence of whale and cetacean sightings right off our beaches. My wife swims with them everyday here in Santa Barbara and I’ve
grown up not seeing them AT ALL!
So the humans and the cetaceans are on the cusp of a meeting and communication… and it’s absolutely fascinating.
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