Mike Giant’s career is the result of gen­uine curios­ity and decades of draw­ing for five hours a day. He’s been—and remains—a world-class graf­fiti writer, tat­tooist and illus­tra­tor with his REBEL8 line. He’s made zines, skate­board designs, ani­ma­tions, prints, col­lages and stacks of inter­est­ing artist and com­pany col­lab­o­ra­tions. He trav­els all over the world, rides his bikes, prac­tices mind­ful­ness, smokes a gang of weed, and is a fully tat­tooed goof­ball that one can bring to din­ner parties.

Whether a page drawn in a friend’s black book amid col­lected sig­na­tures of other graf­fiti writ­ers, or the large-scale works he hangs in gal­leries, Mike Giant’s draw­ings will fool you, even up close. The clean­li­ness, razor edges and solid blacks of the images all come from a Sharpie and Mike’s surgeon-steady hand, but look like they were printed. “In some ways, I took a lot of pride in that,” Mike explains. “As the graphic world has become more fix­ated on vec­tor graph­ics, I think I wanted to show that I could repli­cate the same results by hand, thereby usurp­ing the notion that com­put­ers are some­how ‘bet­ter,’ which I think is bullshit.”

That abil­ity to make flaw­less solids and lines is a spe­cial one, and it sep­a­rates Mike from the pack, but in art as in life, we can get stuck in the forms that lib­er­ate us. “This year, I started to feel like the orig­i­nal draw­ings were feel­ing really stale and imper­sonal when hang­ing in a gallery… I felt like the time had come to infuse more of my hand, heart and mind in my draw­ings.” In the sum­mer of 2008, Mike lived on a house­boat in an Ams­ter­dam canal. “Over the course of my sum­mer in Ams­ter­dam, I started to think about ways to make my orig­i­nal draw­ings more per­sonal. I began by mak­ing nota­tions about moment-to-moment things in the white areas around the inked illus­tra­tions: things relat­ing to the music play­ing in the room, or the kind of mar­i­juana I was smok­ing, or just the ran­dom thoughts that I notice when prac­tic­ing mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion. Then I started writ­ing out expla­na­tions of the sym­bols I like to use, out­lines of movie ideas, food fan­tasies, etc.”