Story of Simon Birch
People often ask about my inspirations and how I developed @the14thfactory. This is my story...
08
Post the collapse of my rave promoter career, I helped a couple of bars get moving, one called Yumla and another, Drop. I opened a recording studio, a skate ramp warehouse space called Six Keys, and began thinking about pursuing art.
Since I was a kid I had always continued to paint and draw, it's a passionate hobby of mine, and maybe, with so many failed careers, the universe was telling me to take it more seriously.
I decided to try to get an education, go to the UK and get an art degree but I couldn’t get through the selection process due to my lack of education.
So I had a go at making my own exhibitions anyway, painting friends' portraits or life-size representations. I knew nothing about the technical side of oil painting, taught myself, but the more I painted, the more my conviction grew.
I got a little recognition when I entered an art prize, a painting of one of my Chinese gangster friends, tattooed in the traditional style, and won second place.
I looked for a gallery to represent me but was turned down multiple times, generally because I had no profile and I wasn’t Chinese. Chinese contemporary was hot back then, straight white guy, not so much. So I would rent or borrow spaces and just hang stuff. I don’t think I sold a thing in my first 3 years of exhibitions.
But one day I did sell something, my work hanging in a bar that was the hot new thing. I think it was a few hundred dollars. I couldn’t believe it! And off I went...!
