My bench design, titled “The Depot at Dawn” highlights The San Bernardino Depot. While this place is historically significant to the City it also holds a lot of personal memories for me. Childhood memories of driving over the Mt. Vernon Bridge and praying the Santa Fe horn wouldn’t go off. Memories of my first train rides to L.A. and Oakland, and other memories that are too personal to share.

The depot is a very old Mission style building and I wanted to reinterpret it in a modern way. I pulled shapes from the building’s form and brought in elements surrounding the depot, palm trees, mountains and the warm California sun to create a simple, graphical pattern that represents a San Bernardino landscape familiar to anyone who grew up here.

Knight Skate is an inline and quad skate shop in Downtown San Bernardino. For this project, I was commissioned to come up with a design that integrates Datura flowers.

After doing some research on the Datura flower, I learned that it was used in ancient times as an aid in shamanic practices. More recently, the Datura flower has been associated with being a deadly psychedelic.

With this knowledge I wanted to create a mural that played on both of those aspects, dark and whimsical with a hint of seduction.