[ Brakes squealing ]
-I am Baso Fibonacci.
I'm a painter who lives in Seattle.
I live right by these train tracks in the Bemis Building,
which is a 100-year-old building
that's filled with mostly artists.
Baso Fibonacci is a pseudonym.
Baso is an old Zen Buddhist from early Zen days in China.
And Fibonacci was a mathematician from Italy.
Zen is a very illogical philosophy,
and Fibonacci is a mathematician,
and math is a very logical thing.
So those two parts of me
are pretty prevalent in my life, I think.
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Mostly I doodled when I was younger,
but then I got into graffiti when I was around 18
and lived with an artist
who kind of showed me what art could be.
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A lot of my early paintings were based around nature.
I'd paint, like, a lot of animal life.
Me and this artist, John Nagai,
painted a wolf that's running south
with the city burning behind it.
And it's on SODO Track, so it's like the busway
where the buses run and the light rail runs.
The wolf is the artistic community.
Artists are moving south 'cause it's too expensive.
I grew up on Tiger Mountain.
It's a small community outside of Issaquah.
It's very woodsy. There's trees, ferns, animals.
Kind of an isolated childhood, in some ways.
My brother was, like, living on the streets
of downtown Seattle in the '80s,
and he was addicted to drugs from a very young age
and just lived a life of being an addict.
And so I grew up knowing that that was a thing and knowing
that that could completely destroy someone's life.
And eventually, he was down in Mexico.
I think he was a coyote,
running drugs and Mexicans across the border.
The autopsy said that he was in jail
and he went into an alley and overdosed.
I remember when my dad got the call that he had died.
I remember him just, like, answering the phone
and then, you know, bursting into tears
and running up to his room and crying.
And my dad did not cry.
That was the first time I think I ever heard my dad cry.
And so I was, like, freaking out.
Called my mom. Said, "It must be Eric,"
'cause that's the only thing
that she could think that would make him react like that.
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What happened -- I was, like, drinking and writing graffiti
and fell off a bridge and broke my back, lost my arm.
I think I was creative before,
but I wasn't really focused on art.
I skateboarded, so I spent a lot of time skateboarding.
And I think not being able to skateboard
and, like, live my life like that,
I kind of, like, found a new outlet for my creativity
and got more focused on painting and creating, being expressive.
Part of, like, the stuff I'm doing right now
is based around the fentanyl crisis and downtown culture.
It's something I see a lot.
Like, I spend a lot of time downtown,
and it's something that has kind of taken over the city.
And, I mean, part of the reason I know what withdrawals are like
is that I was on morphine for 10 years after my accident.
And trying to come off the morphine was extremely hard.
And so I kind of have, like, a small inkling
of what withdrawals are like.
I know they're a lot worse when you're on heroin
or if you're on fentanyl than what I had,
but even with, like, the small amounts of morphine
I was coming off of was really, like, a struggle.
So, these are the foils
that people have smoked fentanyl off of.
You can see the little lines that the blue pills make
as they slide across the foil when they're smoking them.
Each of these will eventually have a painting on them.
I am painting skulls in the foils
'cause people are dying from the fentanyl.
And I'm trying to quantify it. Like, people hear numbers.
They hear 200 people die downtown this year, about.
And that doesn't really tell you anything.
It's just a number that you hear.
When you actually see 200 skulls,
you can start to, like, understand
how many people that is to die
in, like, you know, basically,
like, one neighborhood.
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But I don't really have a point I'm trying to make,
'cause I don't know the answer.
I'm making art just based on what I see
and what I think is interesting.
I hope just to create some kind of conversation.
There has to be, like, compassion.
They have to, like, look at these people's point of views
and, like, understand that these people are suffering.
They might not have had a nice upbringing.
You know, you have to have compassion for people
that are living on the street for sure.
It's, like, a rough life,
especially going into the wintertimes.
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This is like a moment in time, and I'm trying
to kind of solidify moments in time with my art.
And I'm just trying to, like,
talk about something individual a way
and hopefully have people have some empathy for these people
that live on the streets.
People just, like, want them to go away.
A lot of people just want them to die.
They want them to be in jail. They don't want them to exist.
For the most part, I'd rather hang out
with people on the streets.
I'd rather have an interesting conversation with them
than, like, drink a beer in a beer hall
and play Ping-Pong, you know?
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-Follow Baso and see more of his work on Instagram.
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Catch Art Zone Friday nights at eight and
anytime online at seattlechannel.org/artzone.
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