S: So all of that being said, even though you acknowledged that it has this subconscious and spontaneous inception, did your work begin with that sensibility? Just letting the weirdness run free?

R.M.: When I was growing up, one of the first things I ever drew was the guy from Cracked [magazine mascot Sylvester P. Smythe]. I had read comic books but it’s like my friend John Mylan from high school, he brought all of these underground comics from Hawaii and when I saw those I was just like, “Gee, that is repulsive!” (laughs) because I was seriously like this Jacksonville, Baptist kid. “This is the devil’s work.” I seriously believed that for a while. But I think that the drawing is a way for me to mitigate my experience with things like sexuality and, uh, just body hair (laughs) just the grotesqueness of being human.

S: It’s weird because I did some research on classical grotesqueries and they really were first implemented in the churches, with gargoyles and weird little archetypes, where they were these strange filigrees that reconciled divinity and just bizarre shit. But they seemed to always tuck them away into these corners (…) they were usually small renderings. And your work kind of follows that in the sense that it is also based on miniature ideas, but you use them in a mass scale. I really first saw your work firsthand when you had your show at nullspace. And I thought of two artists in particular: Raymond Pettibon and Gary Panter. And I think I saw some of the similarities in the line quality as much as the ideas.

R.M.: You know, after I had that show, I was friends with Panter on Facebook and I actually wrote him a thank you message for making that possible. Just trying to be unfinished and immediate, that was akin to his style. It didn’t really happen before him in illustrative art. The whole RAW comic was just radical.

S: In your work, I also see these weird corollaries with Alchemy woodcuts, where they had truly juxtaposed things, ideas that shouldn’t be in the same place (…) the moon has a face, the sun has arms. Like I think your drawing “Ren,” has a sense of this. It’s almost visual ideas we take for granted now and things that have kind of infiltrated common graphic design. But those Alchemical images were ultimately codes for these mystical messages. I guess I’m just wondering if overtime you might have realized more overt influences of what you are creating.

R.M.: Over time, I started looking at people or things I could be influenced by. In L.A., I did take a Far Eastern history class. But then I discovered Masami Teraoka, a Hawaiian artist who was doing contemporary themes, in the style of a woodcut, but he did this with watercolors. And seeing his work made me go back even further. And the Japanese had made these prints as a way to sever their ties, Buddhism-wise, with China. They were making fun of the monks: monks were drawn as monkeys and frogs, and “look how absurd this is,” “it’s absurd to have a tradition.” And I thought that was awesome. Teraoka was on the cover of L.A. Weekly. And I saw a pretty big Robert Williams show when I was out there, when they were really kind of pinning down that “lowbrow” deal. He had the show in this tiny, little gallery called The Soap Plant on Melrose, and the same people had the La Luz de Jesus Gallery.