I decided very early that I would be an artist with a capital A. Not casually. Not part-time. Not romantically. Intentionally. In my first serious painting class in the early 1990s, the instructor said, “Decide if you’re an artist with a lowercase a or a capital A.” I didn’t hesitate. I wanted two capital A’s. Because I understood something most young artists are afraid to admit: choosing art is choosing risk. It usually means poverty, instability, and explaining yourself at family dinners. You do not declare that you will compete with Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Salvador Dalí, or H.R. Giger unless you are willing to look slightly insane.

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I was willing.

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From childhood, it was obvious something was different. I drew constantly. I disturbed adults with dramatic imagery. I illustrated my classmates’ worlds before I understood what branding was. In junior high, I was drawing Dungeons & Dragons characters and getting in trouble for it at Christian school. I did not see rebellion. I saw practice. I saw leverage. I saw a future where skill meant freedom.

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By the time I entered fine art training in San Francisco, I wasn’t looking for a degree. I was looking for lethality. I took figure drawing repeatedly not because I struggled, but because mastery mattered. I studied anatomy at UC Medical Center. I drew cadavers. I painted hearts outside the body. I proved to myself that nothing intimidated me. I recreated complex works like Escher’s self-portrait in the orb simply to remove fear from the equation.

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I understood something critical: if I was going to be a capital A artist, I had to be commercially intelligent. Romance does not pay rent. Discipline does. My first major paid work came when Donna asked me to recreate a Michael Parks painting on the back of a leather jacket. I was barely out of my teens. I did not yet possess the full skill to do it — but I executed it anyway. That moment taught me something permanent. Skill can be forced into existence when belief is stronger than doubt.

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My first business, Perception Graphics began as a screen printing company. It evolved because I refused to price myself like a technician. Logos were not $25 an hour tasks. They were intellectual property. They were leverage. By 1993 we had launched one of the earliest commercial websites on the internet. Not because it was trendy — because I could see where it was going.

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From there, instinct met opportunity.

Olympian Picabo Street.
Pete Townshend’s nonprofit HEAR.
Big Brother & The Holding Company.
Primus. Mix Master Mike of the Beastie Boys.
Radio Kings — where I built a paid digital doorway that disrupted traditional radio so aggressively executives threatened shutdown.

The Portland Trail Blazers Web TV concept during the blackout dispute.
Pirates of the Caribbean campaigns fr Verizon.
Hyatt’s global HR front door translated into 13 languages.
Pepsi National’s U.S. HR platform.

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These were not lucky breaks. They were proofs of pattern recognition. I did not simply design. I architected systems. I saw market gaps before clients could articulate them. Even as a small family operation, we competed against agencies exponentially larger — and won.

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Because being a capital A artist never meant being limited to paint. Leonardo was not a painter. He was an engineer of vision. That model made sense to me. Art, design, strategy, music, tattooing, film, web architecture — they were never separate lanes. They were weapons in the same arsenal.

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Between 2010 and 2020, much of my energy went into building physical ecosystems: expanding Legend Ink across multiple states, designing retail interiors, constructing brand environments people could physically step into. The work never stopped. It shifted form.

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Then life intervened. A hurricane erased decades of artwork and personal history. And for a moment, the narrative could have fractured.

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It did not.

Because identity is not stored in objects. It is stored in conviction.

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Returning to California was not retreat. It was recalibration. The House of Bogdanov is not rebuilding from weakness. It is refining from strength. We have removed excess. We have tightened standards. We have chosen purpose over volume.

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The Brand Gravity Studio today is not a continuation of an old agency. It is the distillation of thirty years of foresight. AI filmmaking, emerging media, brand ecosystems, cinematic narrative — these are not trends to us. They are the next instruments in a lifelong composition. We were early to the web. Early to video internet. Early to mobile. We will be early again.

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The difference now is precision.

Less noise.
More inevitability.
Less content.
More consequence.

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I have always believed I belong at the largest table in the world. Not from ego — from preparation. Everything I have done, from drawing cadavers to pitching NBA franchises, has been training for scale.

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Becoming unavoidable is not about fame. It is about resonance. It is about building work so structurally sound, so strategically aligned, so culturally sharp that it cannot be ignored.

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The Bogdanov name did not come from ancestry. It came from decision.

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I decided to be an artist with a capital A.