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I’m a print maker and so when I first saw orange crate labels, they were still in lithos, you know, that’s art printing. Some guy drew on a stone, printed this, did another thing and registered with that and got a full color image.
So, I gravitated to this because I was a print maker and I said, these are stone lithos, for crying out loud! Some, some German craftsman came in and worked at Western Litho and he made these things. They’re really beautiful things to me.
So, I wanted them and these guys- collectors I met, these were guys that went out to packing houses and they would find stacks of them, you know because the industry changed. They no longer made wooden boxes, they had cardboard boxes so they just threw this stuff in the back and these guys would collect them.
Um, then they’d sell them at the swap meets and I’d come across and then somewhere down in and they had thousands of them so they sell them for a buck or fifty cents or something but some were rare ones that were 19th century lithos and they charged a hundred bucks for them or something like that and I couldn’t afford them.
So I just started and say ‘hey I’ll paint you a picture—do you have a family member or somebody you want done, and so I painted them a label- they trade off with you. So I started collecting those things and that’s how I started doing these things.
The beauty of my stuff is, I do everything myself. See all this lettering and stuff like that, and all that? Every orange I do myself. I mean I paint that. I sit there and do these little things on it. I cut every letter—I mask it out and cut every letter. That’s freedom though!
That means they can’t touch me. I don’t need them to justify my stuff. There’s enough people out there. There’s enough who will say, hey, I kind of relate to that.
Data: September 8, 2011
Localização Geográfica: California, US
Interviewer: John Esaki, Kris Kuramitsu
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
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