Artist's Bio

Cuban-Puerto Rican born Troy "El Dibujón" Rodriguez is a native Floridian artist that found out that he had an unusual ability to draw at a very early age.  As a young boy, his half brother Angel would sketch out drawings in his school notebook, and later show them to him; challenging him to draw something similar.  This event would have a profound impact on him for the rest of his life, for it triggered what would develop into a quasi-impressionistic attitude towards his artistic approach, because he would try to copy whatever he saw.  Unfortunately, however, he soon became aware that he could not precisely emulate every image he saw, and so he would often find the process frustrating, and often met with great disappointment.  His daycare teacher's recognized in him a great leaning towards drawing and coloring as well as penchant for building blocks, but he was usually under par with just about every other subject.  Shortly after the age of six, his half brother left home and became a permanent memory.  The recollections he had of sports cars, trains, and buildings being sketched by his half brother would forever leave a mark on his artistic psyche, in that he never felt good enough to compete with such detailed or well refined works of art.  Later on, his grandmother Eulalia would provide as the new catalyst behind his sources for inspiration, when she did the very same thing; only this time the subject was a stick figure like doodle which he felt confident enough to attempt to copy (like the ones shown to the left).  While neither of them were anywhere near being accomplished artists in their own right, the cathartic effect of creating art was enough to astonish him into making this his full time hobby.  He would later draw inspiration from watching cartoons on television, a process which he would often try to learn on his own, but unfortunately would give up due to the lack of proper training.  It is for this reason why his studies would often occur at very sporadic intervals; which only managed to stunt his progressive development.

A few years later, well into mid elementary schooling, he had received his first proper art classes as part of the school's curriculum.  It was during this period where he developed and refined his technique with color pencil.  He even got some of his work (depicting images of Christ's hands, as well as other symbolic representations such as a bird of peace) immortalized on the marble plaques that the school's sister location had installed in their auditorium.  He felt that this was nothing more than just good Samaritan for a life of sin that was sure to follow.  Unfortunately, the school's religious practices and very conservative institutionary customs were at odds with his nature.  He would get into trouble for drawing images of the entire faculty in wrestling matches, and finally would get sent to the principal's office because he drew some rather offensive material that wasn't necessarily a part of the status quo.  While the images of nude women pleasuring themselves on a sports car wasn't exactly his idea to begin with, but rather a classmate's, he's still glad to this day that he did his part to not only contribute to the delinquency of a fellow minor, but that he also managed to successfully upset the rather stuffy air about the moral majority in the private Catholic school that he attended.  It was also around this time that a childhood sweetheart of his wound up attending the very same school that he was going to.  When the "girl next door" (or two next doors down) wound up marrying his new next door neighbor he was devastated.  The constant sense of rejection that he felt he had to deal with coming from the world outside would forever profoundly impact his work.  And it was by this time that he started dabbling in abstract art dealing with themes of human nature as well as computer animations that reflected a more light hearted comedic side to his personality.  Unfortunately, the bulk of this work was used as organic bonfire starter fluid because of his perfectionist or quasi-Buddhist (take your pick) tendency to destroy all of which had been created by him, either directly or indirectly.  Let's just say the artwork that he felt was not up to scratched was destroyed.  And the really important work (i.e. the computer animations) were lost due to a highly unexpected floppy disk crash of an error.  To him, the idea of "destructo-art" was just a way of completing the progression.  With all the techniques he had learned now burnt to a crisp, he had no frame of reference as to how his artistry was developing over the course of his lifetime.  If his best ideas were still in his head, they were probably meant to stay there, he thought.  Months later the girl next-next door was divorced, and he took up playing guitar as a means of further coping with rejection.  After seeing Oliver Stone's biopic of The Doors, he considered Jim Morrison as his personal hero, and even grew his hair long to protest the social norm in the daft environment he had to attend.  By the time he entered high school, his parents had decided that they had enough with the ultra close minded teachings as well as the day-to-day hypocrisy that their child was being exposed to so they decided to enroll him in yet another private school, devoid of any religious affiliation.

It was during this time (i.e. his sophomore year at school, to be exact), that the first incarnation of The Animate Tripe was born due to the opportunity that presented itself when Troy's English teacher suggested that he submit his cartoons to the school newspaper.  Unfortunately, the social class politics that he encountered at the new school he was in found his cartoons to be way too wordy and even incomprehensible at times.  And so, the cartoons he submitted for the first quarter of the school's publication never made it to print, and have forever been lost in the annals of histroy (sic); and so he slowly started becoming overwhelmed with the same old sense of indifference, all over again.  Also important to note is that around this same time, he began signing his signature with a slash through the R of his last name; which is usually mistaken for an obvious drug reference.  "I changed the appearance of my signature because I wanted to make the last letter of my surname ("z") to cut through the first letter ("R").  Most artists usually abbreviate their first name and write out their full last name, whereas I don't have time to waste when it comes to creating works of art.  So I reversed that whole conventional naming process by writing out my first name and abbreviating my last name, with this rather unusual looking suffix of a signature!  I think I subconsciously did this on purpose, since most people associate the drug symbol with a means of bettering themselves.  And since that symbol was in the mainstream already, it seemed easier to blend into the public consciousness.  So to that effect, I guess I wanted to better the art culture in general with my personal artistic statement, or voice, or whatever it is..."

His artistic pursuits were now starting to become secondary, since he was now in the throes of learning music.  It was around this time that he got heavily into 60s music, courtesy of his father.  The Doors, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles were all favorites, but none had a more profound impact on his way of thinking than Pink Floyd and the tragic story behind their founding member Syd Barrett.  Time management was slowly becoming an ever increasing pressure on him, and so he had to find a way to juggle his art with his music and school.  It was around this time that he started employing the use of fluorescent markers in his artwork, all the while taking note of their illuminating effects under black fluorescent tube lighting.  These works would be the catalyst for what would later be known as The Bacterium Kulture Samples (and subsequently The Kolorama Series).  Other earlier works from around this period alluded towards The Psychosomia Melancholica Series, as well as The Intricity Series, and a handful of other contemporary pieces from his pen & ink collections.

He started noticing certain characteristic patterns develop out of the art he was producing at the time.  Not very long after these initial ideas manifested themselves on paper, he set out to categorize each of these types of art he was producing, in a highly unsuccessful manner...all by hand!  The general idea was to develop a method wherein he could mass produce large quantities of highly intricate pieces of art.  The only setback, of course, was not only the lack of resources needed (such as a scanner and/or laser jet printer, which were both still highly new, if not generally expensive technological devices at the time) but the lack of discipline he had in the completion of his works.  "You see, in the early days, I looked upon art as just a hobby that could have one day developed into something greater...the only problem was that the mediums I was exposed to at an early age tended to slow down my development; and so I would freely pick up right where I left off after a long period of time.  Most of the works I had started say...one summer, would have been finished about a year later in the spring or something!  I never really felt as though I was an accomplished artist...as a matter of fact.  I'm even embarrassed to admit that I'm a painter, for I have yet to advance my techniques in that medium!"  Another thing he found to be necessarily lacking was his education, or limited access to one thereof.  It was as though his hobby was almost working against him at times.  He had no outlet to share any of his ideas with, nor could he communicate any notion of sharpening up his techniques because there really wasn't any kind of expert on the subject around to question.  And so he spent many long hours on his own, always awake at the wee hours of the night, usually over the course of the summer, attempting to tweak and modify his craft ever so more.  His new school had no art curriculum whatsoever, and his one attempt to matriculate himself into a magnet school, located in downtown Miami (whose name doesn't deserve to be mentioned) was met with immediate disappointment, due to the fact that his being enrolled in a private school immediately disqualified him (or lowered his chances of ever being accepted) by default.  "It was not only a shock to me that I had never once in my life had picked up a pastel or charcoal pencil prior to that magnet school's entrance exam, but something of a rather harsh realization that I still had a long way to go in learning about being an artist."  It wasn't long before that he would find himself getting frustrated and realized that pursuing a career in art using this mass production method of his would inevitably prove to be futile, since he couldn't manage to hone his craft quite well enough.  And so off to the bonfire again went the great bulk of his art collections.  To him art was nothing more than a mythological (albeit psychological) phoenix that always managed to resurrect itself from the ashes whenever need be.  It was around his junior year in high school when he got turned onto famed 60's underground comic icon Robert Crumb, courtesy of the Terry Zwigoff documentary, and was greatly inspired by the provocative nature of this artist's work.  Troy's new sketchbook would now contain more satirical and thought provoking cartoons that was his answer to having his work turned down at each and every step of the way in his artistic career and fueled his overwhelmingly intense desire to be make a name for himself in the art world.  He vowed to someday do something with these sketches that he had been saving away, but that dream wouldn't be fulfilled until several years later.

It was in his senior year in high school that he began to experience his first serious bout with depression, due to all the stress that came about from having to make up his mind about what career path to pursue in college, as well as from the culmination of these routine late night "burnings of the midnight oil" which would soon proove have a profound life altering affect on his life.  Because of his inability to cope with the day to day idiosyncrasies coming from people that he really couldn't see himself associating with on any social level (i.e. the feminine plastiques and their varsity jock off boyfriends), he remained absent for about a month and a half or so, whilst seeking the help of a psychiatrist.  The prescription medication (or means to an end guesswork in a lab coat type test case cocktail) only made things worse.  At times he couldn't sleep, while at other times he would sleep completely throughout the day; all the while altering and/or debilitating up his body's chemistry little by little.  A side effect of the medications he was taking made him gain more weight, which was yet another reminder of his cruel adolescence.  He spent most of the time prior to this breakdown lying to his schoolmates that he was high on drugs just so they would leave him alone, all the while putting on one hell of a freak show performance which involved randomly walking on benches and staring out into space as well as growing his hair abnormally long and unkempt.  Now he found that he didn't want to let others know the truth about the pills he had been taking to cope with his depression.  Eventually, he worked up enough nerve to go back to school and finish the last remaining semester, only to graduate and wind up attending summer school (for the first and only time in his life) in his senior year at school.

After a while, he gave up taking the medication and eventually found himself attending FIU, simply because it was the only college (well, technically, it's a university) that accepted him.  Somehow, he felt that the whole enrollment process was unexplainably way too easy for him to have been accepted and this line of reasoning made him feel a bit guilty at times because he was still highly unsure as to what he wanted to do with his life.  At times he thought the university must have made a mistake in the enrollment process and chose his name by accident.  Fortunately, a newfound friend by the name of Linnea Butterfield, who was in the same orientation group as he was, spotted a want ad for some creative talent to contribute to the university newspaper (AKA: The Beacon) and suggested that Troy ought to try out for it; thus putting an end to that crazy notion; but only temporarily.  Even though he was a bit hesitant at first, he eventually mustered up enough gall to walk in there and volunteer for this rather crazy stint.  The first cartoon he submitted for the university publication never made it past the powers that be, since it was basically parodying the want ad he responded to.  Either the management found this cartoon to be substandard and in no way bearing any semblance to an actual cartoon with a visual gag of a punch line, or  they found it offensive, since it was basically put; mocking their designing department.  This cartoon was lost, or technically "misplaced" if you will, at the office of the Beacon.  Any who, Troy, in an effort to persevere in the face of adversity, decided to take the criticism at its depreciative tongue-in-cheek face value, and decided to keep trying.  Eventually, the staff recognized his artistic talents (since they had no other choice) and soon learned to embrace his off-the-wall eccentricity.  Quite a few cartoons later, his notoriety reached an all time high when his spring registration line cartoon had caught the eye of a feminist whom labeled the cartoon as totally misrepresentative of the female college body.  "And just why nobody ever questioned as to whether or not the skeleton was a lady...is beyond me, I tells ya!"  This highly misinterpreted event not only brought him attention (unwanted and/or otherwise) but but it also signaled the beginning of the end of the Beacon Years incarnation of the Animate Tripe.

Well into the second semester of his college days, Troy's grades had begun to slump, due to the pressures he was facing from his schoolwork as well as from his next to nonexistent social life.  It was these problems that would tantamount to his walking away from the school, and decision not to complete any of courses in his second semester; an act which prompted the school to place him on academic warning (which was basically just a prelude to academic probation).  A visit to his psychiatrist once again didn't help make matters any easier, and so he decided to just take some time off.  In the summer of that year, he took a trip to Puerto Rico and worked on sketches for his second art book.  These cartoons and loose ideas would be the basis for the latter half of the Animate Tripe's Beacon Years incarnation as well as many other projects that he had in the works.  Upon coming back, he was refreshed and ready to go back to studying.  He completed his third semester, but had made a costly mistake by repeating a class that he had thought he initially flunked, and so the guilt he felt for wasting his parent's money soon began to haunt him again.  By the time the fourth semester rolled along, he had already left the school newspaper for he had enough with putting up with the likes of the condescending likes of his fellow staff that were always treating him like less than a subordinate right from the get go.  His last cartoon (exactly like his first) didn't make it to the press, only this time it was due to its highly explicit nature.  Basically it was just a dog getting it on with another dog and what they were going to do now that the "lipstick" (i.e. reproductive sausage link) of the male had gotten stuck in the female.  A revamped form of this cartoon can be seen in the Idpi gallery portion of this website; the original, once again, was unfortunately misplaced (or seemingly mishandled) somewhere in the newspaper's office.  It was at that point that the editor had decided that he had had enough with Troy's "attempting to be controversial" behavior and decided not to run it without consulting with him first.  And so Troy decided to return the favor by quitting just days before the subsequent cartoon's deadline.

Troy had made it halfway through the following semester, when sometime during the late winter/early spring of 1998-'99, he had suffered from an episode which doctors can only describe as a case of clinical depression mixed with high anxiety, which landed him in a hospital.  He believed that this episode was a spiritual awakening because it was not brought on by some artificial means whatsoever.  The only drugs that he had indulged in up until this point had been nothing other than just the occasional beverage and/or non filtered cigarette.  "I had already gotten well enough on my own to basically kick the treatment medication, and I know for a fact that this ordeal wasn't exactly a relapse.  It was just one of those things that was meant to happen for some reason or another…an event which I’m still trying to figure out for myself, especially to this day.”  He later found out that this surreal sense he experienced was called synchronization.  It is in this state, that a person partaking in the experience (also called the observer) can somehow manage to step outside the area of his limited self perception just long enough to realize what’s going on about him at all times; all the while realizing the importance of his role in the grand scheme of things.  Unfortunately, this particular experience led to a number of subsequent blackouts with a rather large chunk of time elapsed in between.  “One minute I was lying in my bed, and the next thing I knew, I woke up on a hospital mattress…and little did I know that I was moved from one hospital to another over the course of an entire week!”  The sight of seeing sick people in treatment would haunt him for the rest of his life.  He regarded the practice of as regulated dosage as the highest form of clinical abuse.

To get his mind off of this very troubling period in his life, he decided to get a summer job; almost in the middle of springtime!  Go figure... Anyways, this was his first real job (or his second, if you count being a movie extra in the box office bomb "The Pest," a stint which he landed courtesy of his guitar teacher Danny Piloto) as an accessory department salesman at the Guitar Center located in Kendall.   And it was through a fellow co-workers (a one Angel Rodriguez; no relation) upcoming music gig, that he became aware of the Wallflower Gallery.  Of course, it would not be until almost five years later that he would hold his first art exhibit at this same exact venue.  Anyways, he held down to this job for exactly one month before deciding to go back to school.  Of course, he never was a fan of going to school over the course of the summer, due to his whole bad high school trip, so he waited until fall.  In the meantime he would assist a friend of his mother's, by the name of Manny Ortuño, which would become one of his best friends; as a general appliance repairman's apprentice.  Of course, Troy really didn't learn much out of the whole repair process, nothing short of heavy lifting and/or loading, that is... This line of work would continue on and off again over the course of two and a half years.

Eventually, his attempts to finish his classes at FIU would soon prove to be futile, since he now found himself alone and without the company of any friends that he knew from the old days (i.e. registration period), since most of them had now moved on with their lives by either transferring to another school, or completing their core curriculum, which Troy was still stuck in.  He took a couple of more classes, one of which dealt with computer technology (or perhaps just a simple intro thereof...) and he found that he had a strange knack for it.  He soon developed a taste for web design and created some early incarnations of what would soon evolve into his T Central web page.  A fellow university student/classmate of his, by the name of Robert Rico, sold him an autographed copy of Kynch O' Kaine's album Traces.  Upon looking at the bizarre method of indicating the year that the album was made, (considering the fact that he was off by a year at the time of the CD's purchase!) Troy decided to adopt it into his work; thus using an open quotations mark (") to indicate a month and a comma (') to indicate the year.  The concept of using shorthand carpenter's jargon for measuring (i.e. inch and foot) into units of time seemed so ingenious, that he knew right away it would replace the older, more traditional method he had been using up to that time; which was nothing short of normal date signatures, only with the exact date (i.e. 01/25/94).  Troy felt that this was entirely too unprofessional, so he decided to stop applying it to his work.  Back in his heyday, Troy would even go as far as including the date that the piece was conceived up until the time that the work was finished!  Making the finished product's signature look something like this: (i.e. 02/24/97-03/06/08).

Another semester later, Troy would make up his mind to officially drop out of college, this time due to financial problems (i.e. paying an excessive amount for repeating courses he had flunked out of in the earlier semesters) in order to re-evaluate his life.  In all the time he had been there, the only worthwhile educational contribution that he felt he received from the university was his first semester's painting course.  Even though he wasn't exactly fond of painting in oil, he did dabble with acrylics around this point in time.  Since these new mediums made him feel like a fish out of water, he never really quite got the hang of it until much later on in his life.  Furthermore, he found still life studies to be rather boring, especially when attempting to partake in them with an unfamiliar set of tools.  The brush was nothing but an Achilles heal to him.  To make matters worse, the teacher he had at the time didn't find it amusing when the class was asked to do draw a profile of a teddy bear for a study, and he responded by drawing a wanted poster of the bear, with an alias listed at the bottom of the caricature as responding to the name of Ted, or Teddy.  Eventually, he would get his hands on his very first flatbed scanner, which helped in transferring most of the pieces that had already been damaged by water spots onto the wonderful world of digital imagery.  And so the two sketchbooks that he had been carrying around since high school were disposed of after being ripped apart, page by page in order to scan the images onto his computer.  This event would signal the end of his blueprints/sketchbook period.  From this point on, all the art that he would go on to produce would be based on these early experimental design concepts, and everything was now made with the sole intention of selling, as opposed to keeping them in a sketchbook, and waiting for them to get damaged by some cigarette induced and/or humid atmospheric conditions.

By the time 2001 rolled around, Troy in a desperate effort to make something of his life, enrolled in a school (that shall remain nameless, but whose abbreviation included nothing but vowels) that targeted its alumni by offering free laptops with registration.  He had to convert the prepaid college fund into actual cash because the school's accreditation level did not fall under the program's list of accepted colleges.  During his first semester, he took a course in life drawing.  It was here that he finally got the hang of pastel and charcoal rendering.  He got the hang of it so well, in fact, that he would randomly go up to any fellow student and draw them on the spot.  During this time, Troy befriended a fellow student by the name of Phil "Philsy" Philbert, whose sister Candi made the portrait shown over here on the right.  The two of them would hang out at a nearby Hooters restaurant, which is where he got the idea to draw some of his best "inspiration" from, when he would engage any random waitress into a rather impromptu portrait session.  This newfound habit of his would continue for the next couple of years; all the while refining this newly acquired technique.

About a few months into the semester, Troy immediately realized that something was wrong when he kept getting billing statements claiming that ludicrous amounts of money were past due, even though he always managed to pay all his tuition dividends on time.  Furthermore, the iBook he received was a cheaper model than that given to most of his fellow classmates; with less storage capacity and a slightly slower processing rate.  He immediately took these matters up with the school's administration, which basically gave him more red tape and an even higher quality lip service'd bureaucracy.  With about less than a month to complete the first semester, a rather unfortunate mishap had occurred between him and a fellow student, which left him expelled until further notice, and with his very own police escort off of the campus' premises.  And his response to this whole incident; "This is what I get for paying homage to a dead rock star/poet whose themes deal with love and murder, and writing in that style all for the sake of some chick that just so happens to work at a strip joint.  Go figure...  It's certainly the last time I write while under the influence!"  This whole incident was enough to make him want to steer clear of the whole university life altogether.  He was eventually offered to return as a student, providing that he provide the school with a letter from a trusted psychologist stating that he understood the nature of his actions.  "And so, I found myself reluctantly going back to my shrink once again, with my tail between my legs asking for her help.  And she immediately insisted on prescribing me the same ole' medication again, for she was under the mistaken assumption that I was still in dire need of medical treatment.  And ironically enough, these wonder pills of hers would later be proven to be the leading cause of suicide rates in America!  Who would have thought that just saying: 'No thank you, you over medicated quack!' would actually help?!?"  Troy stormed out of her office and vowed to never again entrust his health to another nut job with a clinical diploma.  He eventually found that he had no other choice of action, but to turn the school's offer for reinstatement down due not only to the fact that he couldn't get a psychologically evaluated letter of approval, but because of the damaging repercussions that the whole accusation had done to his persona.  Soon afterwards the school's billing department would come after him claiming that he still owed them for the semester he didn't complete.  The reason being, of course, that he had cancelled a check he had written to the school, just a school day before the whole "incident" happened.  Eventually this alleged debt was turned over to a collection agency which Troy still refuses to pay even to this very day.  "So when I cancelled the last check that I paid before this whole misunderstanding took place, they had the nerve to charge me for services not rendered!  Talk about adding insult to injury, folks!"

A wayward childhood friend of his, by the name of Mike Perez, had once suggested to Troy that he had ought to try submitting his works to Mad Magazine.  And oddly enough, when the illustrator of Mad Magazine's "The Lighter Side" Dave Berg had passed away, Troy spotted an ad in the magazine that was basically a contest to see who would be lucky enough to have their comic strip featured in the publication.  Troy had worked a couple of weeks on the cartoons (AKA: The Mad Tripe) and submitted them to the usual gang of idiots at Mad headquarters.  Unfortunately, he never heard back from any of them, but at least it gave him something to do for the time being.  He decided to keep this level of enthusiasm going and attempted to submit yet another series of cartoons, The Idpi Series, to a rather popular men's magazine.  After the initial submission was turned down, because Hugh refuses to accept anything involving delivery confirmation signatures, Troy decided to send it again and wait for an answer.  Sadly, however, the answer never came, but at least he got their attention...hopefully, somehow.  In the months to come, Troy would find himself resurrecting old ideas and revamping them in an effort to put a new series together.  He recalled a presentation at the school he got kicked out of and began to working on a collection based on those images.  This series would slowly but surely evolve into what would later become known as the Devas and the Gypsies & Aristocrats collections, respectively. 

Months later, Troy began experimenting with the catalog of scanned images that he already had by tweaking the images up with his favorite graphics program Paint Shop Pro (initially 7, and subsequently 8).  Taking his cue from yet another explanation he heard in one of the classes from the university he was ousted from, he took the concept of enlarging surface images and the many wonders produced by scaling pictures, and proceeded to scan an artist's spatula that he had not cleaned for quite sometime, which resulted in a caked pattern of colors on the surface of the knife.  The results of these experimentations with organic, and naturally occurring art would yield yet another series, initially entitled Digitalis.  Many other collections would soon develop out of the initial collective.  Unfortunately, later on, his computer crashed, and he had lost about a third of all the work that he produced over the course of about two and a half years.  "Yes indeed, pride does come before the fall, or so the saying goes... One thing I've gotten into the habit of lately is to make sure that everything gets backed up as soon as I'm finished working on it!"

Troy would go on to achieve a marginal success in the fall of 2003, when he got inspired to draw a portrait of fellow artist Claudia La Bianca from the late night variety show (that occasionally featured strippers and drag queens!) La Cosa Nostra on Americateve.  She gladly accepted the gift and invited him to present her with this piece of art on the air.  However, the powers that be, (principally his shy and awkward nature) decided against it, and the ending result yielded only in getting the art piece itself roughly about fifteen seconds of airtime.  Continual visits to the set of America Teve granted more airtime to the portraits he made of the then show hosts Omar Moynelo and Javier Cerriani as well as other talk show guests and even the occasional television crew.  His philosophy ran along the lines of what Jim Morrison was doing in his heyday, which was making the myth.  He would visit the set and draw the hosts and/or crew on the spot not just as a way of getting noticed, but as a way of sharpening his skills.

After a few attempts at selling his artwork online through eBay had failed, Troy decided that he needed to try another venue for his art.  May 1st, 2004 would mark Troy's first appearance as an artist, when he set up a spot at the Flagler Flea Market.  Lack of planning (mainly due to a shortage of disposable funds) on his part resulted in the damage of quite a number of his pieces when a slight water spell had fallen around midday.  "It was here that I learned a very vital lesson about fine art...and that is; the finer the art is, the more you should invest in getting a proper frame for it!"  A month later, another opportunity to showcase his work presented itself when he entered in the Flagami Fiesta, prsented by Barón DaParre.  It was here that he met yet another famous local talent from the AmericaTeve family; Maylen and presented her with a number of sketches that he had made for the various actresses and musicians on the Fernando Hidalgo show.  She suggested that he come down to the studio for a spot on the show, which he did...several months later.  After an initial meeting with the show's producer and host, he was told that they would contact him to set up a date for the show's broadcast.  That promise, of course, never fell through, and so he decided to carry on tweaking his website as a means of better presenting himself.  Subconsciously, he believed that he just wasn't ready to present himself live to promote his work, and so it was quite a relief to him that the network never decided to contact him.  "Basically put...I had decided that my ass was not a chimney, and so I didn't really care for people that had the habit of blowing a fair amount of smoke up it.."  A couple of months had gone by, and no immediate prospects that didn't seem too costly failed to manifest themselves, so he decided on launching a random campaign all over the streets of Miami.  The idea was to build up a myth, or urban legend if you will, by simply wandering from place to place drawing people on the spot, for free.  He figured that word of mouth would somehow follow and that would've been enough to make a name for himself.  Unfortunately, he never got farther than winding up in local neighborhood cafeterias, and the only thing he would occasionally win for all his efforts was just a free cup of Cuban coffee...all the while leaving his card under a new nickname which he had adopted for himself, "El Dibujón" (which is an exaggerated Spanish word, which basically translates into one who draws a lot).  His card's motto would read "Any Face, Any Where, Any Time..."

After the novelty of doing free portraitures for people in exchange for a dose of caffeine wore off, Troy had decided to call it quits for a while and join the workforce in an effort to pay off a rather sizeable amount of credit card debt that had been piling up since his glory days at FIU (the very same place that he acquired that damned piece of plastic from in the first place!).  It was the suggestion of his friend/mentor and former boss Manny Ortuño that made him decide to become a security guard.  And so it was at the beginning of 2005, until about halfway into the year (early June to be exact) that he had had his first actual steady job.  And after about five months of intense heat (and a golden sunburn a la skin cancer) he decided to use the money that he had saved towards putting on his first art exhibit at the Wallflower Gallery in downtown Miami.  About a month later, the contract at his post would expire; which to him meant a green light to go ahead and retire his rent-a-cop uniform and focus more on promoting his first art exhibit.  A couple of months later, after failing to secure a potential buyer for his art, Troy had decided to take everything off the wall, pretty much against the gallery manager's better wishes, and simply put...go home.  "Of the sixty-six pieces I had up there, not a single one of those damned pieces sold.  And it wasn't like I was asking five thousand dollars for a dab of paint or anything!  But at least I can die now knowing that I accomplished something with my life...just what exactly?  I still haven't the foggiest!"  Perhaps you can get the gist of what he accomplished by clicking on this link.

Months later he would land a job at a law office and continued to work there for about two and a half years.  His grandmother's passing would forever leave a profound impact on his value of his work.  He no longer saw art as a means to make a name for himself, but as a way to give back to the community and as a means to help out those who were less fortunate than him.  And so, it was right around at the beginning of 2008, that Troy vowed to raise money for charity by selling his artwork online through eBay’s MissionFish program.  Easter of this year marked Troy's first successful sale of six original pieces of art from the Bacterium Kulture Samples, which is now entitled The Kolorama Series.  And so he continues to work to this day, always improving upon his technique and constantly revamping the bulk of his artwork; all the while vowing to raise money for areas of charitable interest.  In July of 2008, he would find himself showcasing his artwork with the Hooah Art Space on Calle Ocho, with the proceeds of his work going to benefit veterans and their families' needs.  It was during this period, that he found himself designing and redesigning websites for his friends as well as The American Veterans Alliance, which played host to the Hooah Art Space events.  All the website work taught him some very valuable design techniques, which he would soon put to use on his own website, several months later.  It was also during this period (July-December) that he also helped put together live musical events for the new art venue, which reignited his interest in music.  Beginning 2009, he has now focused his direction towards selling as many original works of art that he can.  His belief is that art should not be something that only the wealthy can afford; there ought to be enough for everyone, regardless of their financial station in life.

And the rest is all just history in the making, or simply put: just a work still in progress...

Bio written courtesy of

P.S. Elliott