Jae Fatal is more than just a rapper, he is a poster child for true talent and underground hip-hop. You’ll get hooked on any of his tracks from the first moment you hear his low, near Barry-Whiteish voice until the last “Ch’yeah!” he throws in to let you know that second guessing your favorite radio jam is a common side effect of his music. The young and upcoming artist recently sat down with us to do an exclusive video interview.

I was raised in a very small town on Lake Huron in Canada. Coming from an environment of vast farm lands and a constantly shifting shoreline was extremely formative for me creatively. I never had television when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in the woods, in the water, or in a book. My grandpa drew crude comics in the style of Mad Magazine, my mom owned a clothing store, and my dad ran a restaurant. Everybody around me was always making something, or promoting aesthetics in some way. I attribute my need to be an artist to my family, and to the natural landscape I was born into.

For the last four years, I have been focusing on the theme of repeating and reproducing a single mark. This body of work contains multiple stages of the work and selections have been made to show the progression and exploration of the application of a series of marks. The work consists of the repetition of watercolor marks on paper in abstract compositions, emphasizing the subtlety, weight, and application of the single mark in relation to
the whole picture. This mark making application allows the pieces to take on a three-dimensional quality and have slight color variations within the gray scale.

I like to take the curve balls life has thrown me and turn them into something beautiful, but also expressing my emotions.

Photography started for me as it did for most: my dad gave me his 30-year-old film camera and I loved every second of it. But I soon realized that I wanted to take different kinds of pictures–ones that were impulsive and of exactly what I saw at that instant, and this would be impossible with a heavy piece of equipment.