He saw guys there airbrushing T-shirts, without much style or finesse, and figured he could do better, even though he’d never picked up an airbrush before. I definitely know I lost some sensitivity.”Īs a teenager in the late ’80s, he started going to lowrider shows. “I think I might’ve lost like a fucking quarter-inch in that whole situation. “They started hacking away at my genitalia when I was a little baby, and they didn’t even ask me,” he points out. “I’m the first atheist in my family,” he says, pointing out that his questions about Catholicism and faith in general pre-dated even the infamous Jesus drawing. Today, he considers himself a recovering Catholic/atheist, one of the few Godless homies in his community, according to him.
His conflicted feelings about God - a fascination with religious iconography enmeshed with a disdain for religiosity itself - can be traced throughout Cartoon’s oeuvre.
His deeply religious family attributed his artistic talent to God, but Cartoon wasn’t so sure. This would be the first and only “job” Cartoon ever had. Cartoon did so well that his father began regularly calling on him to help him design restaurant menus, logos, whatever his customers needed. When Cartoon was 12, his father gave him his first job, designing for a client at the print shop he ran. Maybe too much detail.’ And he looked at the nuns and says, ‘Hey, don’t bother me with this shit again.’” He says to me, ‘Son, why did you draw this?’ I go, ‘It’s in the Bible, Dad.’ My old man dropped to one knee and goes, ‘Hey, son, you ain’t got nothing to be embarrassed about.
I knew if my old man had to leave work for this, it wasn’t good. “I just remember seeing his feet walking toward me, and he had his blue Dickies on, and his work shoes. The nuns, concerned, called his father in to discuss the drawing. I mean, if he doesn’t then I’m not sure if I’m a believer anymore.” “I thought ‘If you’re God, and you’ve got a son, and he’s the ruler of the universe, he must be hung like a horse, right?’ I was this innocent little boy I don’t even think I’d seen a grown man’s weenie, but I figured Jesus must have a super big dick. Like the time, aged 10, he got in trouble with the nuns at his Catholic school for his drawing of Jesus naked on the cross, after he’d heard a story about the Romans stripping Jesus of his loin cloth. His family noticed his artistic talent, but they weren’t quite ready for how he planned to use it. His mom and dad encouraged their son’s interest in the arts, taking him to see art-house movies, introducing him to disco and psychedelic rock. The shit I trip on at 3 in the morning.” The works connect the dots of his personal stories of the last 35 years: stories of prison, of gang life, of Hollywood fame, of botanicas where Virgin Mary candles flicker - angels and demons imprinted on his psyche since he was a boy.Ĭartoon was born Mark Machado in 1969, to middle-class Mexican-American parents, and grew up in the Harbor area, south of Los Angeles. This work, he says, is his future as well as his history, a collection of all the themes we’ve come to associate with him: “The beautiful women, the rose petals, the teardrops also the tunnels, the homelessness, the fucking writing on the wall, the garbage, the fucking feces on the ground, the porta-potties, the shanty homeless city.
Imagining his entire body of work eaten by worms sparked a panic in Cartoon, an urge for legacy that inspired a whole new body of work on canvas and sheet metal - media that he hopes will stand a better chance of survival, affording him a longevity he only just realized he craved. “They say you can’t take anything to the grave, but you do take your tattoos in the box with you.” “It’s bizarre when they die,” says Cartoon, thinking of his clients who have passed away, and the Cartoon art they took underground.
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