KR: Can you share some of your earliest memories related to art?
GONZO247: I've always been artistically inclined, and I knew that I liked being creative. At a very young 
age, it was something I wanted to do, but I didn't know it was called art. Initially in my neighborhood, 
there really was not a lot of public art. The only major piece of art I had access to was a mural 
called The Rebirth of Our Nationality painted by an artist in the neighborhood at the time named Leo 
Tanguma. My entire childhood and my earliest memories in life were driving past this mural. I was six 
years old, and the mural was just humongous. It was free, and it was on the street level. I remember 
thinking to myself, I don't really know what this is, but one day I really want to do something like that. 
I believe that mural planted a seed in me.
KR: How do you translate your ideas into such massive spaces? 
GONZO247: I will say that we’re in Texas, and everything’s bigger in Texas!  I think one of the 
advantages for me is I had plenty of large spaces to practice, so by default I started working on a 
large scale. On top of that, I am just not good at working small. A small painting that’s two feet by 
three feet can take me months, but I can do a 17-story building in eight days. The bigger I go, the 
more free I feel. I feel like what I’m creating is larger than life. I have room to mess up and room to be 
loose. The smaller you go, it almost seems like everything, every line matters. 
There are different methods to transfer an idea to a larger scale. If you can draw it on a piece of 
paper, you just got to go bigger. Nowadays, there are so many different tools. I’ve seen very cutting-
edge technology where people are wearing virtual reality goggles and using the goggles to trace their 
images onto an actual surface. That’s the cutting-edge technology, but personally, I like to sketch to 
get the image up in the quickest way possible.
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TRENDS 2026 	
	
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Figure 3. Piping Technology Mural Project. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 

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