This art is what happens when you grow up in the woods of Kentucky with a photographic memory, going to a small private school in a nearby town but living on a deep-rural farm with bookworm parents. You end up reading Kipling as a toddler and Kafka as a pre-teen, and drawing at an impossibly precocious age. I'm proud to say my style has progressed very little since those formative years. I don't disown my rural upbringing. I revel in it. There are those who seek to whitewash all "primitive" aspects of rural life in the South, even to the point of being offended at shows like "The Beverly Hillbillies". These are the people who would homogenize Kentucky to the point of being indistingushable from anywhere else. These are the people who cannot abide the knowledge that I, Jethro, walk among them. They are the enemy. However, unlike some artists, neither do I rely on ruralness as a gimmick. My art represents Kentucky life as parts of a greater whole, as elements of an almost holographic construct, rather than relying on flat cliches. I am not going to spend my life painting barns, covered bridges, and cornfields for their own sake. These things tend to appear in the backgrounds of paintings of things of far greater importance during my rural upbringing: comic books. sex. music. food. Iconic imagery that personifies the mysteries of nature and life that probably can only be fully understood by those of us who entered puberty surrounded by haunted wilderness.