Collection: a.k.a. skips

I am a.k.a. skips—a Rotterdam-based painter, musician, photographer, sex worker, and queer trans man. My interests lie in creating "theory you can fuck."
I was born in San Francisco, where my self-taught art practice began as a delinquent teenager in the street graffiti scene. At 13, I taught myself how to produce music using a cheap copy of Logic Pro 6. Later, I graduated from NYU with honors and a departmental award in Recorded Music at 20 years old.
I spent my 20s touring the world as a DJ and musician. In 2021, I retired from music to privately begin my gender transition. When I returned, I did so as a truer version of myself—even if it was less "socially acceptable." My photobook i want to rest and be held by someone who loves me is an elegy to the first 30 years of my life; it memorializes acts of self-destruction that were a marker of an inauthentic life. Regardless of the form my creativity takes, I know that liberation means crossing lines.
My painting is rooted in immediate, human experience. I use my own body as a reference point to contextualize my art in relation to the world, painting naked self-portraits in moments of vulnerability, sexual expression, and/or power. Sometimes I exist within clearly defined spaces; sometimes I exist abstractly against spray-painted backgrounds and illustrative elements. Occasionally, the bodies depicted are not my own but generic forms suggesting cis-normative experience.
I combine techniques from my time as a street artist with self-taught traditional methods to create figurative work. In my latest series, these serve as a foundation for stenciled text offering concise, lived perspectives.