Leonardo Drew in "Investigation" - Season 7 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

Leonardo Drew: When I get up in the morning, I know exactly what I'm going to be doing. I'll be working.

I don't know what the works are actually going to be about, but they find their way.

I was drawing and using colored inks and things like that. People in the neighborhood, the projects where I grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, they were telling me about this place called ABCD Cultural Art Center. They said that well you have to go there because they have paints and canvases. And I said, "Wow, this is all this stuff for free?"

So once I made my way over to them, I ended up with these mentors. A fantastic group of artists who were just there helping kids. And I was one of them.

I was approached by DC Comics and Heavy Metal magazine and Marvel Comics to, to do work for them. When I saw this black and white reproduction of Jackson Pollock's work, when I was in the library in high school, that was it. And that was my first take on what fine art was. Imagine Jackson Pollock in black and white, but it still elicited such a visceral response

that when seeing it I was kind of like wow, this is amazing. From that point on, I began to question what I was doing up against what I had seen and what I had felt. More actually what I had felt. Probably would have been like fifteen.

I was still exhibiting a certain type of work, but it had touches of what I had realized.