Gar has explored creative expression for as long as he can remember. Growing up in a musical family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, he was surrounded by talent, but it was his mother, a self-taught painter and master doll maker, who encouraged him to explore his artistic side. Trips to the frame gallery/supply shop in downtown Gulfport with her are among his fondest memories, and the first thing resembling an art museum that he remembers.
Having grown up in a rural town outside of the Gulfport-Biloxi metro area, he was exposed first to the folk art regularly displayed at festivals. It was in this small shop that he discovered early influences in the posters and prints there, ranging from Japanese traditional art to the pop artist Patrick Nagel. He would later discover Fantasy art from Boris and Frazetta, leading to a life-long fascination with those styles.
He aspired to be a comic book artist as a youth, and submitted a pitch to Malibu Comics while still in 9th grade. He was politely declined. He sold his first piece, an 11x17 pencil study of David's right arm, for $50. In that same year, he would display early paintings at "Wojo's Coffeehouse" in downtown Gulfport, just a few blocks from that art supply shop.
Professionally, he has worked as a multimedia designer since 2002, after graduating from Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College with an AAS in Graphic Design Technology. It was at MGCCC that he took his first formal art classes under Mr. Charles Acres in 1997, continuing with more studio classes at University of Southern Mississippi while briefly studying as a Radio, Television, and Film major before going back to MGCCC to study Design.
Though he wasn't always painting in his 20s, he was constantly "making." During this time he explored a more primal creative urge, working extirely in natural media; carving antler, making hide drums, crafting jewelry, designing powwow regalia, bamboo musical instruments, and some simple metal craft. During this period, many of his works on paper were charcoal, a preferred media at the time, though some canvas were produced. Most explored sacred femininity in pagan spirituality.
He first participated in an art exhibition in 2013, a couple years after relocating to Louisiana, while living along the lower Cane River to better explore and focus on his artistic pursuits. This show was held in the Badin-Roque house during October, and featured several affiliated artists designing installations around the theme of "altars". In 2014, the same group, the Down River Art Gang, was invited to town to show in formal gallery exhibition in Hanchey Gallery on the Campus of Northwestern State University as part of the university's Creole Heritage Day celebration and the Natchitoches Tricentennial.
Descending through a melange of 300+ years of ancestry in American Southeast, he has explored his own cultural and ethnic roots, taking inspiration from an historic spectrum of human expressive arts from the cave paintings of the Old World to Creole folk Catholic imagery of the New World. Having grown up in the borderlands where the Anglo-Protestant settlers of the Pineywoods met with Louisiana/West Florida Creole colonials of the Gulf Flats, he rests in the tension and has explored what it means to be given, or to adopt, cultural and ethnic categories and labels in his way of life and in his art.
