St. Lucia Quotes

I am home grown St. Lucian. Born in 1980 I have spent most of my life on this island. Apart from the few summers I spent in the United States I spent most of my time in my homeland.

Normally when I'm writing, in the beginning I don't think of lyrics at all. I'm just improvising.

[My mother] was the one who encouraged me constantly and always reminded me that God gave me a talent and I have to use it. I should not keep it locked inside.

ACID Kreationz was founded in 2008. I formed this business with the purpose of paying my university tuition because my teaching salary would not be able to cover school payments.

[I] was always my dream to attend the Art Institute. I have always had this zeal to become the best that I can be and I saw that this institution will act as an avenue to me achieving that goal. I applied to the institution and got accepted based on my impressive portfolio.

I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.

When I'm writing, those ideas are seldom inspired by music itself. I won't often listen to an artist and come up with an idea.

As I got older, my ambitions changed and I wanted to be a graphic designer. In form five, I did Art for CXC and got a grade 2 at the general proficiency level. I was devastated because I was aspiring for a grade 1. I took a break from art when I went to A level because I could not cope with the disappointment of my Grade 2. But I guess when you love doing something you just can't turn you back on it completely.

A pretty pivotal moment for me was having a songwriting class with Paul McCartney when I was at LIPA, and then being called in a few days later by the headmaster of the school to tell me that Paul McCartney likes what I'm doing.

We should not let negative influences get to us.

Music has always moved me really deeply, and it's always been more about that than about the desire to rebel or annoy people (although, I've had my moments of that as well). I think it was just years of maybe moving slightly away from it but always coming back to it as the thing that I'm best at.

World music evokes a feeling. You don't have to think about the scene that it comes from.

I've been making music for as long as I can remember. I would, as a kid, just sing little ideas or be making something.

Sometimes, I even learn new techniques from my students. Although I am still a student at the Art Institute, I think that I have learnt a lot from the classes that I have already taken.

I view the art scene as an industry which is slowly developing. These days, technology has mad the world smaller. Meaning that information is a website away.

I labour over details and whether a song should be a straight pop song form or exploratory. This is the curse with doing things by yourself.

Trying to be really dark and alienating just felt exhausting to me, so I started going back to the music that I grew up with, whether it was African music or pop music. It took me away from being overly self-conscious about what I was doing.

I was constantly drawing and colouring. I had an immense love for art and anything which involved art fascinated me.

I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

None of my songs are written 'about' someone or something, they all just sort of tumble out unannounced, like the worst kind of house guest.

I tend to keep my mind open to the different forms of art out there and I am always willing to try new stuff.

The moment you're too apologetic about something and people know that something isn't finished, they listen/look for the mistakes or cracks, but if you act like it's done people experience things in a totally different way.

From as long as I can remember, I was always fond of drawing.

I must say that the first person to realise that I was talented in art was my mother.

Normally the meaning of the songs, if there is any, occurs to me after I've written the song.

Apart from the traditional paintings I also dabble with a little photography.

I find that I have done a pretty good job of fusing all three of them so far and I intend to get better at my craft. This is the reason why I am always eager to learn new stuff, especially from those who are more experienced than me. I am like a sponge. My ultimate goal is to open an animation studio in St. Lucia.

I think that there is always room for improvement so I am seeking to reach as far as I can in my field of art, film and animation.

Of course I had the parallel of having the early years of my life being spent during apartheid, and then having a lot of awful poverty going on around me while I lived in this bubble of middle-classness, but I was a child, and I only really started to (I hope) understand all of that fairly recently.

I decided to create a really good laptop recording situation and to learn how to write that way, rather than have the perfect stuff around.

I got a job as the Visuals Art's Teacher at my Alma Mata, St. Mary's College. Then my interests shifted to animation. Ironically, it was one of my students who sparked this energy in me by introducing me to an animation program called FLASH. So I dabbled and played around with it.

I am trying my best to stay above the water. Right now ACID does not only offer animation. I offer real life productions as well and also compositing (animation composited into real life video)

Don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for anyone who has the nerve to even attempt to do music today, but this is just about what excites me.

What I love about African-African music is how unselfconscious it is in so many ways.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of the US, and hopefully spending some of the summer in Europe playing festivals. It's early days though, so who knows.

When I was developing St. Lucia - around 2008, 2009, at the peak of Pitchfork culture - what was considered cool was being as alienating to your audience as possible.

I have noticed that these days, people don't want to take their time to succeed.

I had my first exhibition in September, 2012. This was when I first introduced the public to my style of the incorporation of cloth in my paintings. It was well received and everyone was fascinated with the work on display. I also invited other young aspiring artist to display they work which was also well received.

Unfortunately, there are very few facilities which offer courses in the arts. Not all the secondary schools offer the subject for CXC examinations.

I developed this guiding statement to stress on the fact that every good thing takes time to develop.

I was extremely frustrated, almost at the point of giving up on coming up with a name for the project (because I'm awful at it), when I decided to play the 'put a pen somewhere on a map with your eyes closed' game with South Africa. About the 5th try was St. Lucia in South Africa, which coincidentally also happens to be an idyllic sub-tropical seaside resort town. The name seemed to fit with the mood of the music, and so after a while it just stuck.

Most of the writing that I do is a complete train of thought process. I'll just be walking down the street or sitting on the toilet or whatever and something will pop into my head and I'll record it on my phone and then over the next little while it'll develop a little more in my head.

I went to this boy's choir school when I was growing up, and I think that the first time that I consciously started making music was when this one kid joined our class. He was an amazing pianist and would come up with all these ideas. I've always had a really competitive side, so I saw him doing that, and was like, "I have to try writing songs as well."

I find that I have improved in my craft and I have improved considerably in my ability to critique other people's artwork. I forgot to mention that my course of study at the Art Institute is BSC in Media Arts and Animation.

There were times when I would suddenly realize making music is a crazy pipe dream. I would see bands that did super well in South Africa still struggling to survive, or even people on the international level who are doing well but financially can't really support themselves.

My family still lives over there [ in South Africa] .I miss them terribly. I would say that most of my life over there was probably very similar to the sort of life someone would experience growing up somewhere like Australia or in the US.

A lot of my ideas come from McNally Jackson bookstore. One of my favorite things to do is just go there and look through architecture books and interior design books. Something about the aesthetics of space and beautiful images works with my brain.

While painting I noticed a piece of madras cloth on the floor. As usual, my mind started working overtime and a pair of scissors and a small amount of glue later...I created THE COMEDIAN. Everybody loved the uniqueness of the painting. It was indeed a hit.