JF: I was born in Queens. I lived in Pennsylvania and Miami before coming this way.

LC: OK. And you went to art school?

JF: I went to design school for industrial and product design and I worked maybe six months to about a year in industrial design. And then I got laid off of my first serious job in industrial design, I was designing flatware. Before that, I was designing toys, which is what my focus was, on toy design. When I got laid off, I took up painting. And when I took up painting I kinda threw everything else out the window..

LC: I see in your work... I mean, just the little bit of it that I've been exposed to, I've seen a little on your website. It looks like you used plastics and lot of shapes. I guess that would be from...

JF: From the toy design?

LC: Yeah.

JF: Yeah. Well, what happened was I took art classes but I never took painting classes because I wasn't good at painting and I don't like still life and I don't like figure drawing. I didn't like any of that boring stuff. And I didn't like abstract art either because I always thought it was senseless, mindless kind of shapes just for the fun of it, you know.

So, I stayed off of painting and I also didn't want to become a starving artist. So, I was like, "I'm not going to become a painter." So, I just avoided painting. But then, when I was just trying to explore some art or whatever, so I didn't have canvas, I didn't have anything to paint on. So, what I did have was a little bit of paint and a sheet of plastic.

So, I started painting on the plastic. And it looked OK and then I had a light box next to me for tracing cartoons. I was drawing character sketches for my toys. And I took the light box, but I held the plastic up to the light first and it looks better held up to the light than it did without. So, when I held it to the light and I liked that, I said, "Oh let me try it on the light box."

And when I put it on the light box and turned the light box on, the white Plexiglas of the light box created the white background the way a canvas does. And then, the light just like shined through the paint and kind of exposed a lot of it, it's like natural, like in subtle textures and stuff.

And then, I was blown away by the outcome. So, I started collecting plastic from the MTA where they'd throw... You know those plastic sheets that go over their posters?

LC: [laughs] Yeah.

JF: They throw all these-- they get scratched up in graffiti, so they always... There's a guy out over at the last stop on the M1 and they would pull the plastic out and put it against the garbage can and they put new ones in. So, I got in the habit of collecting the discarded plastic.

And then, I got to know one of the guys who discarded the plastic and he would set some stuff aside for me. Then I would ride the train sometimes all the way out to other end stops and collect plastic. And then, that's kind of how that started with plastic. And then, once working with plastic, having knowledge of vacuforming techniques from the toy design and the industrial design world, I realized that I don't have to be a two dimensional painter. I can turn the two dimensional painting into a three dimensional object.

LC: How often do you get here?

JF: Well, I'm here probably nowadays like three days a week. But it's a lot of management of property as well. I mean, everything in this loft is half finished. So, I can't just sit in my studio and paint when I know that the bathroom is only half tiled or this room isn't finished being set up or--we just got lighting in this place. I've been here for four years and there were only two lights in this whole place. Now, we have a light in this room, because there was no light here. Everything was lamps and extension cords. So, just getting stuff organized in this space on two floors, and then, also, trying to get the art together and travel out and do all the shows and stuff takes up a lot of my time. And I do a lot of street art too. I do a lot of sticker and stencil graffiti, so I put a lot of time into that, which disappears. You make art and then it's gone.

LC: To me, I've always noticed there's a huge difference between like someone like Banksy and just... I guess there's graffiti and then there's vandalism.

JF: Yeah.

LC: Did you start in vandalism?

JF: No. Honestly, like when I was in high school, I had a lot of opportunity to get into graffiti and I knew graffiti kids. But my dad is a cop and it was really difficult for me to imagine getting in trouble and getting arrested and then my father finding out. So, I kept my nose clean for most of high school, which is usually when a lot of these kids get into graffiti.

But graffiti definitely inspired my work. A lot of my early, early paintings kind of have like this horizontal kind of expression and a scratch into a lot of my paintings. And people would say it reminds them of graffiti. I think a lot of graffiti was always an inspiration to me.

[In studio] This is a piece that I did that was my piece for a window in a hotel in Manhattan. So, there was something that looked out on the street and then something also that faced inside of the hotel. In some cases, you can kind of see like this scrawl that's going across here. A lot of people feel like it's reminiscent of graffiti because it almost looks like writing, it almost looks like a signature.

If you zoom in on some of the stuff that's going on here, it's like a microcosm of... ideas, I guess. It looks kind of like natural environments, just maybe with much more vividly in color.  And I started making the light box because I hadn't even turned it on and off and-- turning  them off, it doesn't look like anything really when you turn it off.

So, I didn't turn it off, I just wanted to close it off. And by closing it off, you don't have to have a big, strong light facing you, but you also get an additional light. So, this is an old art shipping crate that I split with the doors on it and it still has the shipping crate handles on it and simple hinges that I've recovered and found in various places.

So, the idea of a door is when you open it up, you have this idea that you can look at. And I just started two very simple formulas for a composition. It's supposed to resemble something that you might see out in space or on your microscope or deep in the ocean. Sometimes, you kind of get off near the elements in one painting so that this kind of looks likes something that could be happening deep in space.

And then, there's some watery aquatic areas that look like its fluid and it's moving and sometimes you get some strange things tangling and wrapping and those are kind of what you might find in the dirt or in the beach. So, that's that.

And then, over here I guess I got another piece with some more similar theme where--and this is where I guess the guerrilla art started happening too--I started doing the old doors and the old doors to me were like these boarded up kind of concept where there's something really interesting behind the closed door and an old, aged, broken up door is always so mysterious to me.

So, I like to overdo it and make the door mysterious, but you know even just the top. And then, behind there you have this image coming through that's intriguing, and then, you kind of get in there and look at it.

This is the beginnings of another light box that I'm doing. These are all old drum pieces that come from this drum over here. The piece I'm doing is for somebody and music is an interest of theirs. I like to kind of personalize a lot of the work. So, this specific piece will definitely kind of lend itself to having rather than just door parts, it would have musical parts on it.

And then, this big table over here that's covered in garbage is just a big light box for when I have to do a 4x8, which I haven't actually done a 4x8 and framed it. I've done a 3x6 or a 4x4 or something like that, but I built this table with that intention, that I could do a big 4x8 sheet.

This is actually some of the graffiti stickers. These are reversals of the things that I've not... This is the gorilla and these are just reversals that I like to keep for myself as a history of what I'm working on.