Although resilient, Giles soon realized that he isn’t in a race with anyone but himself—even as a kid. “Once a week, I’d get new, blank writing paper—and throughout the following days, I’d fill it all up,” he says. “I’d sit in my room narrating stories, conversing with myself all day.” In addition to creating, he also soon learned to hustle his creations.
“Before I hustled my art, I was hustling a MySpace page for my music,” Giles explains. “I would go around my school freestyling to people, proposing if they liked it.. they would have to like my Myspace page.” Many of us reading this have entertained the concept of what it is to hustle and have realized that in order for hustling to work, you’ve got to have a compelling product to sell people. Luckily for Giles, his work features pieces that are as visually fascinating as they are deep.
“Where Did the Fun Go?” features compelling drawings, including one that depicts an opened head with a surfeit of faces infused with remembered memories. “I’ve always studied people and my environment, and learned from others' mistakes,” Giles explains, when addressing the idea of inspiration. The late comedian Robin Williams and late painter Basquiat have both imprinted Giles with a penchant for the tortured soul, but their work also helped inform him on what routes to avoid.