Tony Diaz

Tony Diaz was born in January 1980 in San Antonio, Texas. He grew up loving music and fed his obsession with lessons, playing in bands, and listening to records. As he grew older, he started participating in the punk rock scene, enjoying the D.I.Y. aesthetic and the attitude. This new perspective fueled his creative drive, leading to his move to Austin, TX, and the formation of a record label he would use to begin his visual art career. The label required design work, and Tony drew on his past, making cut-and-paste photocopied punk-rock flyers to create a new and interesting persona known as “ANTI.”

Further development led to making wheat-pasted street art on the streets of Austin, as well as a burgeoning clothing line. Tony used his passion to teach himself to screen print as the clothing line began. This bore his newest creative obsession, and Industry Print Shop was born. With facilities and techniques now available, there was a sustainable way to continue to be creative and a myriad of new methods for “ANTI” to make new work. This printed and deconstructive process was in harmony with his previous attitude and D.I.Y. aesthetic, so the evolution of his current body of work began. The work is derivative of the punk-rock ethos. The imperfect results show the processes and reflect the gritty reality of daily life. Influenced by Andy Warhol, Winston Smith, and comic book illustration, Tony deconstructs and re-appropriates new compositions and narratives. His thought processes and techniques become the narrative in an intuition-based action and reaction. Deconstruction is the means through which the artist understands himself and others, and this literal deconstructive process yields visual results.

Can you introduce yourself?

The tough thing is, when I do these types of things, it's, you know, I'm Tony Diaz, the founder of Industry Print Shop. And for so long, it's that has been so much a part of my identity. Just recently, it's like I'm proud of it; however, I'm so much more than that. I'm a father and a coach, and those are the things that bring me happiness. Making art is just my form of self-care and therapy. And I'm fortunate enough that people like it.

I'm from San Antonio. I moved up to Austin to live out a dream to perform, be on stage, and generate the energy that moved me so much growing up as a kid. And so being in a band is one of those things where you're one fraction of the whole. And if not all the other pieces have that singular vision, you know, there's this, this pretty, push and pull, where it generally just kind of starts to cancel itself out. I loved the scene. I loved the energy. I loved everything about the music and wanted to continue participating. I remember being on stage and having this moment of complete clarity where it was that realization that you're living your dream. You worked and worked and worked.

And though you wanted to give up, and you gave up, and I gave up and different facets, I feel like it, but it wasn't giving up. It was more of letting go and accepting that I was opening additional doors, and those doors led to what I ultimately wanted. I say that I was married to music, but I had had an affair with art and screen printing, and I wanted to really pursue that. It was time for a new chapter. I never really considered myself an artist until some friends of mine kind of shook me up and said, this is art; what you're doing constitutes as art.

I felt like a designer and an artist were two separate things, and having that notion of or that characteristic of an artist, I felt like it was this tortured soul. But once somebody told me, hey, you're making art. That really opened the door for me to just kind of, like, let go and drive and create. And I think that, that's art. That gave me the confidence just to keep going and make things.

Do you have a process for creating your artwork?

Um, and I didn't really have much of a process other than this sort of reactionary, like I do something and then I react to it. It was this sort of organized chaos that at the end of it, if it made me happy and I could look at it and say this felt good, then that's it. Like just submitting to the process and letting that take over, letting the process take over, is where the magic happens.

Can you share a bit about your show Water Your Flowers.

Everything in the background had been great. You know, my kids were healthy, the business was growing, and just everything was as it should be. And what's interesting or what I'm excited about is for the first time, I'm making work where, you know, things are different in my life. And so what I'm excited about is channeling all these emotions and just bringing big change into the work. It's something that I've never experienced. I feel like I was doing work just to let out pent-up energies, and now the work that is going to be on display is not just pent-up energies, but it's pent-up emotions. And that's really what I'm excited to get out into the world.

Final Words?

For anybody else and my kids. What do I want to say to them? Keep going. Just keep going. Forward momentum. Forward movement is better than no movement.