I feel natural for me to paint the flag because it's something that's been ingrained in me since I've been a child. It was something that felt natural for me to do just to explore the idea of painting on the flag and including my style of a graffiti texture to the surface. There's no blatant disrespect to the flag, and my any means, really what it is, it's me exploring the essence of what the flag means and to me it's an organism. That flag represents my flesh and I represent my blood and bones, and the flag as an organism has the ability to get sick. The red represents the blood and the fire and the energy, there's strips and there's other tones in it that are more warm tones to bring it out, almost like a fire. We have the white, that's the flesh of somebody who's getting sick. The blue represents the people. Those are usually compiled with names, people that I admired or mentors or other names that were important to me. They have named the finalist and let's come up with a video campaign for the Democratic Push for Healthcare Reform, and one of the finalists is a bit of a surprise. You're seeing the video right now. The flag that I painted for the video wasn't supposed to be considered a desecrating flag or insulting anybody, it was basically to show the flag in motion in that time lapse as an organism. Those were the issues and the certain things that were under the healthcare debate. It's just compiled onto the flag until the problem doesn't get solved and the issues and all the problems basically overcome the flag. The health of the nation, which is basically the people that are suffering, turns out that it became one of the top 20 finalists. Is this one of the winners? Dissecreting the American flag? It was featured on Hannity that Obama administration was basically sponsoring me to desecrate the flag for liberal views for people who hate America. They got the American flag splattered with graffiti. They used the word graffiti as a way of saying that I'm some total scumbag and I basically was desecrating the flag in honor of the Democratic Party. It was total bullshit. This video was produced by someone who built himself as the king of graffiti in Los Angeles. Health care graffiti. Then it went to O'Reilly. It does desecrate the flag. It does. This is the flag. This is the American flag. Is there nothing that we can respect now? It starts hitting all the right wing websites for ugly man. It was thousands of comments of people saying I should be dragged to the streets. I should have my hands chopped off. I should be pulled to pieces. One lady said desecrating the flag equates to killing Jesus' puppies. So apparently I kill Jesus' puppies. Not only do you wish death upon children but puppies and everything that's American as well. So it really turned into this little bullshit whirlwind where these right wing conservative total whack jobs took it as a point to expel their frustration. When in fact they were totally ignorant to the whole entire topic and I'm happy to be America's enemy number one. Please, by all means, it makes my art more valuable. So you can all fuck off really. You can keep it coming. You know, Fox News, you know, you can fuck off. Hannity, I would actually like to smash your teeth in. I'm a fuck to all. That's right. My state. That's right. It's Pepper's world. I'm an artist who has epilepsy and I have no way to get health care at this point. I've had so many emergency room visits at this point. I've lost count. And you know, this isn't me getting dizzy or anxious or something. This is me like getting hit with a Mac truck with multiple grandma seizures in a row. I've been out for days. My shoulder just locates. My face bones dislocate. I cannot get health insurance because I'm uninsurable. I've been denied by all health insurance companies. I think the fucking insurance companies are the most foul evil entities on the planet. To have somebody between you and your health. To tell you that you're not worth the care when there are facilities available is a travesty of our nation. I felt the need to continue this because obviously I'm not done. There's still more flags than you painted. Recently I've worked with Richard Eduardo and modern multiple studios with Daniel and we're putting together a flag print. I really like the process of the print making because it allows you to create these multiples but at the same time play with different versions and kind of the process. I feel the need more to instead of building the images on a computer to paint them basically live there. So do one screen, paint it on the film on the lightboard and then basically start adding up the screens so that it's almost as you go process. Just go in there, spray paint on it, scratch it. I was scratching the hell out of it with my knife and that's a lot of fun really because you get some really cool textures. In essence these prints are all unique. I use different painting techniques to kind of create some lens on it. The one is the straight forward red, white and blue version with the layers. The other version is a black and white layer. It's almost like this wicked, sinful-esque element to it. It's not the American flag, it's something else. It's just a representation of it. There's no connection to the actual American flag. We took one of the black pieces and then we go leafed with a 23 carat gold leaf to add that much gold onto the surface to go through the process and go leaking. It's almost like blessing. I really love the process. I think it's a very interesting process and I find it very forgiving and very adaptable.