SHORT BIO:
I am Drew Kinkade, a 24 year old artist from the Twin Cities.I like to paint, screenprint, make videos, make clothing, make music, make rugs, and more.
In 2018 I created a brand called Flavor World which creates clothing, art, and videos. In 2021 we expanded into a record label, fittingly called “Flavor World Records,” which offers an array of services to help local bands create and distribute their music.
I hope to inspire people with my work, and to offer them new perspectives on what art is and what it means to be an artist.
Please support me by purchasing some art, a shirt, watching a video, or hire me to paint a mural for ya!
Click HERE to CONTACT ME!
LONG BIO:
I was always creatively inclined, but for most of my life I didn’t realize it. As a child I liked to doodle, make videos, and I had made several businesses (lawn care, car washes, massages for my family, duct tape wallets for my friends, and even iteration one of “Flavor”) But I never thought anything of all this. I was just a kid being a kid, I thought.
As I grew up, I realized I was good at math and great at physics, so I quickly decided I was to be an engineer like my father was. I never questioned this in my childhood and accepted it as a reality.
Yet still the creativity would work its way out of me.
In 7th grade me and my friend Sully would make skate videos. He was an excellent skater, and I loved filming and editing, so we made for a productive duo. After making a few videos we wanted to have shirts to represent us. We came up with “Flavor” as a brand name, and I designed the first logo where the “O” in Flavor was replaced with a donut. We made about 20 shirts by using Iron transfers on Hanes undershirts. We wore them proudly for a few months, but quickly this endeavor faded away. We were just 12 years old after all...
Years passed and artwise I remained pretty constant. I grew up and graduated high school, still feeling 100% certain I was born to be an engineer.
I attended The University of Minnesota in The College of Science and Engineering and started to truly pursue my career as an engineer.
However, it was during my first year at university that I believe my creative journey truly began.
My classes were all rooted in math and science, suppressing my natural desire to create. All of my time was spent with numbers and problem solving.
In the margins of my math homework my creativity slowly began to trickle out.
I was doodling constantly in class, drawing characters or elaborate diagrams to go with the physics problem. I didn’t own my first sketchbook yet at this time, so all of my art was somewhere on the back or sides of my homework.
The art got better and better, funnier and funnier.
Eventually I wanted to put some of it onto shirts so my friends could wear it.
I was planning to order custom shirts online, but when my friend Fletcher heard this he said, “that’s not like you, to just have someone else make it for you.” This comment would forever change my life. “He’s right,” I thought. I then proceeded to spend months teaching myself to screenprint because of what his simple comment inspired in me. I used internet forums and endless trial and error to figure out the art of screen-printing.
Thank God I did. Learning to screen print sent me down a creative and entrepreneurial journey that I’m still only just beginning.
After learning to screen print, I figured I might as well put my new skill to use and form a clothing company. I needed a brand name, and I remembered back to the brand I started in 7th grade, “Flavor.” I liked it, but it was a bit generic. It needed something more. It needed a little extra, well, flavor! The first plan was to call it “Flavor Wear,” but at the last minute I decided to go with “Flavor World.” Good. I felt like calling it Flavor Wear would trap me in clothing forever, while deep down I knew my passions lied far beyond just clothing. And truthfully, I only liked “Flavor Wear” because I thought it was funny how it sounded like “Tupperware.” Things were so silly and unserious back in those days. I really didn’t understand what I was getting into. It was a bit of a joke to me at this point. Just a side project. A hobby.
Only 6 months after learning to screen print I formally founded my company Flavor World in March 2018. I formed an LLC, applied for a trademark, and released my first line of clothing to the public. Things were no longer a joke to me. I was studying all week, then going home to my parent’s garage to print the shirts all weekend. Just three months later I dropped out of school with the burning desire to make this new company of mine a life long journey. Abandoning my career as an engineer was EASY the moment I got a taste of the Flavor...
I immediately pursued the business with full focus. I loved it. The brand allowed me to explore all my creative interests and also have them contribute to something productive, my business. I began shooting videos for marketing campaigns, doing graphic design for posters, shooting photography of the clothing, and eventually I even attempted to paint.
It was a simple and innocent attempt to paint. A cute girl I knew liked to paint and she suggested I try it. Okay! I went to the store and bought white paint, red paint, and navy blue. A wild trio of colors. I didn’t know what I was doing. I took them home and I painted for the first time. Immediately I was amazed. Paint is just liquid color! I fell in love. With painting, that is. Sadly, the girl and I don’t talk anymore, but I do like to paint everyday.
It was late 2018 when I first painted, and already in the summer of 2019 I got asked to do a massive 40 foot long mural on the exterior of Parkway Pizza in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. At this time the largest thing I had painted was a 1 foot canvas from Michaels. Yet despite my inexperience, and with the promise I’d get paid in pizza, I confidently accepted the job and began sketching right away.
Still to this day that first mural is the largest one I have ever done. Painting that mural gave me a new confidence and fascination of painting that I took home to my personal works.
Through 2019 and into 2020 I continued to grow the brand, printing shirts to pay my bills, and painting the rest of my free time away.
With the various lockdowns and emotional toll of 2020 in Minneapolis, I began to lean deeply into painting as an emotional outlet, and soon I realized my dream of being a full time painter.
Around this time I realized a problem in what I was doing. I was struggling to create the works I dreamed of creating. I talked with other artists, I journaled about it, and I painted until I figured out the conflict within...
I realized I approached my paintings very logically. My engineering background raised me to be a problem solver more than an expressionist. I viewed my paintings as puzzles and seemed to ramp up my brain power when painting, while my artist friends would let go, release their minds of thoughts, and simply just paint. I couldn’t get myself to just paint, and this drove me crazy.
Still I continued on my journey, and at the end of 2020 I had to move out of my rental house. I knew I wanted an art studio, but I also needed a place to live. I counted my money and realized I could only afford one or the other. I chose art.
For the next year and a half I lived inside an art studio in St. Paul. I had to shower at gyms and do laundry at my friends houses, cook meals on a hot plate and sleep on a couch. At times it was hard, but I knew it was exactly what I wanted.
I was painting more than ever and was simultaneously exploring new mediums of art. I began to make rugs and realized that the internet may want to see the process, as I myself found it to be very unique. I started to create videos of me making rugs and I put them on youtube. They did incredibly well, amassing over 38 Million views on my Youtube channel. Like, insanely well...
This success on Youtube generated a lot of attention towards me, and created a brief era of my life I now call the rug era. When the views started coming in the millions, I got really shy about what I was doing. I was becoming famous for making rugs, but at heart I knew I was a painter. It felt like a huge conflict at the time, as if my life was being written the wrong way, but in hindsight I now see that art is art regardless of the medium, and that attention in the millions shouldn’t be wasted. I didn’t really enjoy making rugs in the first place. It was only novel for a short time.
At the top of my rug career I had abruptly stopped making videos all together and entirely shifted focus. In spring of 2021, with the help of my new friend Brett Havens, we created Flavor World Records and dove head first into the local music scene.
We began a video series called Live From Flavor World and recorded over 25 bands performing in the St. Paul studio I was living in. The work kept coming in, and soon our new record label was consuming the majority of my time. We began hosting shows, filming music videos, helping produce projects, and providing other services, like merch production.
Creating Flavor World Records helped establish my brand deeply in the rising creative scene of the Twin Cities. My personal network of creatives grew x10 in the first year of running this label. It was this expansion of network that eventually led to Flavor World collaborating with Indeed Brewing in late 2022, which is still ongoing at the time I’m writing this.
Looking forward, my primary hopes are to inspire others to create, and to be able to paint everyday of my life. I hope to train my abilities and become the best artist/entrepreneur I possibly can. Life is a long journey, and we are all so young. I encourage anyone reading this to try a new creative medium with no expectations upon yourself. When I first painted, I thought nothing of it. “Sure whatever I’ll try it” was my attitude. Now just 3 years later I’ve basically dedicated my life to it. You never know what journey lies behind simply trying something new. Allow yourself to experiment and be creative without judgment. And whatever it is you enjoy doing in life, be sure to chase it and never let go. I call those things the Flavors of life.
PS check out my store to buy a print or an original, and please hire me to paint a mural it’d mean so much to me and i’d do a great job. email me at drewkinkade@gmail.com !!!
thank you!
