Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Freaking Ding Bat. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Freaking Ding Bat, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
In the last four years, I’ve had my apartment broken into and everything I owned was stolen. I had to put my dog down, my father died and my business was destroyed by covid lockdowns. Art gets me through it. It’s my escape. It’s the place I can turn my brain off to the outside world.
We have no choice but to keep going. Giving up is boring. There is a nagging question that remains in my brain, “But what’s next?”. Every day is a chance to create your comeback story. Art, family, and a few close friends to bounce ideas off of give me a chance to maintain a level of balance and perspective.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself.
Freaking Ding Bat isn’t necessarily one person. It’s a group of people. We paint bats, we draw bats, and we make bat products. We paint bat murals. We also do a lot of illegal street art. It’s all under the theme called “Neon Goth”.
The whole “make everything black” vibe is exhausted when it comes to goth, Halloween, or horror movies. It was important to stand out and figure out a way to juxtapose a handful of things that no one is really doing. It started by writing out things we loved. Sofubi toys, comic book illustrations, Halloween, bright colors, horror movies, color gradients, synth wave, and cyberpunk music. A character had to be chosen to represent all these things. Something that would give a singular focus, something that all of these things could coalesce into. Going out at night putting up a lot of illegal street art, it was fitting that a bat was chosen to represent this project.
My current passion project is partnering with businesses and creating bat cave installations. The long-term goal is to partner with a bat rescue so that when you buy a piece of Freaking Ding Bat art, you’re also adopting a bat and contributing to bat wildlife rehabilitation or conservation.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Don’t go to school. Creativity doesn’t get taught. Just buy a bunch of supplies and make things you love. Express your pain, happiness, loss, and joy. School can’t teach you those things.
Do a lot of work. Make art that sucks! No one is good their first time. When you see someone who’s good at something you’re seeing a decade of failure converging into something that looks effortless. Keep making art that sucks, it will improve over time into something that eventually doesn’t suck.
The best artists are not the most successful. If you want to make art full-time for a living get good at branding, marketing, and creating a lot of exposure for yourself. Don’t be afraid to work for free in the beginning. Artists are afraid of the word “exposure” but if you have a lot of exposure and people are not offering you money it just means your skill level isn’t quite there. It’s hard to hear but you gotta get honest with yourself. If you’re good at what you do, and you are in front of the right people, the money will come. So start building an audience and be undeniably good at what you do and everything should fall into place. Bonus tip, have a lot of patience! Nothing life-changing happens overnight. So keep going. You got this! 🙂
To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you.
Growing up I didn’t understand my dad. We didn’t have much of a relationship. I had a nuclear upbringing. Two parents in the house that loved each other. But my dad worked 12-hour days making sure his kids had everything we needed. But our relationship suffered.
My father was in the Vietnam War and was exposed to agent-orange. He started developing all the same symptoms his war buddies did. It was a quick decline that ended about a year ago. In the last few years of his life, we finally were able to talk. establish a relationship and he was able to open up. He finally told me he loved me. Getting to know him before he vanished from my life lifted a huge weight off of me. It made me understand what’s important. He was able to help me refocus my life.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.FreakingDingBat.com
- Instagram: @FreakingDingBat
- Facebook: @FreakingDingBat
- Linkedin: @FreakingDingBat
- Twitter: @FreakingDingBat
- Youtube: @FreakingDingBat
- Yelp: @FreakingDingBat
- SoundCloud: @FreakingDingBat
- Other: @FreakingDingBat
Image Credits
Freaking Ding Bat LLC
