St. Lucia quotes:

A lot of my ideas come from McNally Jackson bookstore. One of my favorite things to do is just go there and look through architecture books and interior design books. Something about the aesthetics of space and beautiful images works with my brain.

ACID Kreationz was founded in 2008. I formed this business with the purpose of paying my university tuition because my teaching salary would not be able to cover school payments.

A pretty pivotal moment for me was having a songwriting class with Paul McCartney when I was at LIPA, and then being called in a few days later by the headmaster of the school to tell me that Paul McCartney likes what I'm doing.

I find that I have improved in my craft and I have improved considerably in my ability to critique other people's artwork. I forgot to mention that my course of study at the Art Institute is BSC in Media Arts and Animation.

Apart from the traditional paintings I also dabble with a little photography.

As a visual arts teacher, I have to keep my mind open. I have explores styles from pointillism to cubism.

I am trying my best to stay above the water. Right now ACID does not only offer animation. I offer real life productions as well and also compositing (animation composited into real life video)

I believe that people have to be sensitized more about the many jobs an individual can branch out to after studying an art form.

I decided to create a really good laptop recording situation and to learn how to write that way, rather than have the perfect stuff around.

As I got older, my ambitions changed and I wanted to be a graphic designer. In form five, I did Art for CXC and got a grade 2 at the general proficiency level. I was devastated because I was aspiring for a grade 1. I took a break from art when I went to A level because I could not cope with the disappointment of my Grade 2. But I guess when you love doing something you just can't turn you back on it completely.

"St. Lucia We Love" is actually a song produced by Stratosphere music (also St. Lucian). The CEO of Stratosphere music approached me and wanted me to produce a music video for this song which was already a hit in my country. I felt privileged to have been chosen to do such a video. So every time I went out to shoot a scene from the video, I would get a still shot from the scene to tease the public. The photo of the amazona versicolor is is an actual scene from the video which was released on St. Lucia's Independence day (22nd February, 2013).

Generally I'll keep 95% of what I sing on that first scratch vocal take. Sometimes that idea will ferment for a long time, and sometimes I"ll be close enough to my studio and have enough time (kind of rare these days) to go and work on the idea. Not every song is super easy though.

I always loved cartoons but the process seemed so difficult. Then I told myself, "Nothing good comes easy." So, I took a plunge and started my first animation stint in 2003.

I am home grown St. Lucian. Born in 1980 I have spent most of my life on this island. Apart from the few summers I spent in the United States I spent most of my time in my homeland.

[I] was always my dream to attend the Art Institute. I have always had this zeal to become the best that I can be and I saw that this institution will act as an avenue to me achieving that goal. I applied to the institution and got accepted based on my impressive portfolio.

[My mother] was the one who encouraged me constantly and always reminded me that God gave me a talent and I have to use it. I should not keep it locked inside.

A lot of the people I was writing with think a lot more about lyrics and a lot more about the details from the beginning. That kind of thinking made me a little self-conscious because I was suddenly having to judge what I was doing early on in the process.

A true artist is practically married to his or her art form so I just couldn't turn my back on it.

An opened mind will eventually lead to a more well rounded artist and this will thus heightenen his or her level of professionalism.

Don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for anyone who has the nerve to even attempt to do music today, but this is just about what excites me.

Everyone can of course take their own meaning, that's the beauty of music and lyrics, but to me it seems like everything is about being attached to the past and being afraid of moving forward, afraid of that big dive or step and losing what was.

For now ACID Kreationz has only one body and that's me. I have intentions of hiring persons when I am through with university. For now it is only me but off and on I contract sound producers and other persons when the need arises.

From as long as I can remember, I was always fond of drawing.

I also got encouragement from my teachers at primary school but one person in particular who had a significant impact on my lean towards art is Mr. Luigi St. Omer. Mr. St. Omer was the one who always reminded me that I should not settle for less than greatness in my art. He saw that I had the potential and he helped me develop that talent.

I am really enjoying media arts and digital painting.

I developed this guiding statement to stress on the fact that every good thing takes time to develop.

I didn't see [Luigi St. Omer] as a teacher. I saw him as a comrade I respected and I could go to see anytime something was bothering me. He was indeed my "big brother". He praised me when I did something exceptional and scolded me when I did things which were out of the way.

I feel like kids that grew up in New York City or in L.A. were exposed to all these subcultures and subgenres, whereas I was only exposed to the poppiest of pop music so I never had this negative connotation towards pop music. That's not South African music having an effect on me, but just how international music was filtered through South Africa affected me. It gave me a not-negative connotation towards pop music growing up.

I find that I have done a pretty good job of fusing all three of them so far and I intend to get better at my craft. This is the reason why I am always eager to learn new stuff, especially from those who are more experienced than me. I am like a sponge. My ultimate goal is to open an animation studio in St. Lucia.

I got a job as the Visuals Art's Teacher at my Alma Mata, St. Mary's College. Then my interests shifted to animation. Ironically, it was one of my students who sparked this energy in me by introducing me to an animation program called FLASH. So I dabbled and played around with it.

I had my first exhibition in September, 2012. This was when I first introduced the public to my style of the incorporation of cloth in my paintings. It was well received and everyone was fascinated with the work on display. I also invited other young aspiring artist to display they work which was also well received.

I had this perfect situation where my studio was a three-minute walk away, and every day I would go to the studio. If I had an idea, I could work on it at the highest level possible.

I have noticed that these days, people don't want to take their time to succeed.

I labour over details and whether a song should be a straight pop song form or exploratory. This is the curse with doing things by yourself.

I met the guys at HeavyRoc through the drummer in St. Lucia, Nick Brown. He is Ben from The Knocks' cousin, and at the time we'd been doing some work together, but everything was still very much in the unsure developmental phase (even though I'd been in it for a year and a half). I told him that if he was going to play the music for anyone that he shouldn't say anything about it and should just play it and see if anyone says anything, and he did it one day at their studio and they loved it and got it touch.

I must say that the first person to realise that I was talented in art was my mother.

I remember my friends at primary and secondary school admiring my work and even paying me money for some of my pieces.

I tend to keep my mind open to the different forms of art out there and I am always willing to try new stuff.

I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.

I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

I think that layers in music, whether it's layers juxtaposing emotions and feelings or layers of texture, make for a more interesting product.

I think that there is always room for improvement so I am seeking to reach as far as I can in my field of art, film and animation.

I try to not be self-conscious in my writing process.

I view the art scene as an industry which is slowly developing. These days, technology has mad the world smaller. Meaning that information is a website away.

I was also always interested in the aesthetic realm - architecture and that kind of stuff - but music was my first love.

I was constantly drawing and colouring. I had an immense love for art and anything which involved art fascinated me.

I was extremely frustrated, almost at the point of giving up on coming up with a name for the project (because I'm awful at it), when I decided to play the 'put a pen somewhere on a map with your eyes closed' game with South Africa. About the 5th try was St. Lucia in South Africa, which coincidentally also happens to be an idyllic sub-tropical seaside resort town. The name seemed to fit with the mood of the music, and so after a while it just stuck.

I was very conceptual about what I was doing; I had the first five albums planned out, and all the songs on every album, and the artwork. I always had these ambitious musical projects in mind.

I went to this boy's choir school when I was growing up, and I think that the first time that I consciously started making music was when this one kid joined our class. He was an amazing pianist and would come up with all these ideas. I've always had a really competitive side, so I saw him doing that, and was like, "I have to try writing songs as well."

I wrote, in total, about 50 or so songs (finished and unfinished) in the 2 and a half years leading up until this moment, and trying to decide what songs to include on the Mini-Album was super difficult, because there were so many different sound/mood roads I could have gone down. But, after going through everything, these tracks seemed to fit together and communicate a similar sentiment and mood the best.

I'm a huge Hayao Miyazaki fan. He might be my favorite director of all time - the beauty that he sees in the world and the attention to detail. I try and focus on that while making music: trying to use as many real instruments as possible, have it feel as tactile and tangible as possible.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of the US, and hopefully spending some of the summer in Europe playing festivals. It's early days though, so who knows.

I'm really into a lot of different music, and a lot of stuff that sounds absolutely nothing like anything on the Mini-Album.

It's sad that some people still believe that artists die poor. This is not the case in this day and age.

I've been making music for as long as I can remember. I would, as a kid, just sing little ideas or be making something.

Like all businesses ACID has its ups and downs. There are actually seasons when business will pick up such as Christmas time and carnival time. There are other times when business will run very slow.

Like, in retrospect, this whole Mini-Album is about itself, and the process of letting go of the fear of what people will think about the music or of me or whatever and just putting it out there. But none of that was intentional at all.

Many of my students learn different techniques online and I have learnt a lot using this medium. Art is picking up in the Caribbean but it's unfortunate that we still have people looking down on it. Many persons who don't know better think that having a career in art is a waste of time. I guess the public just needs to be educated some more.

Most of the writing that I do is a complete train of thought process. I'll just be walking down the street or sitting on the toilet or whatever and something will pop into my head and I'll record it on my phone and then over the next little while it'll develop a little more in my head.

Music has always moved me really deeply, and it's always been more about that than about the desire to rebel or annoy people (although, I've had my moments of that as well). I think it was just years of maybe moving slightly away from it but always coming back to it as the thing that I'm best at.

Musically, some of the acts that I've really been identifying with are: Fleetwood Mac, Roxy Music, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre, Earth, Wind & Fire, in general music that seems to have a lot of romance to it and a certain glamorous idealism.

My family still lives over there [ in South Africa] .I miss them terribly. I would say that most of my life over there was probably very similar to the sort of life someone would experience growing up somewhere like Australia or in the US.

None of my songs are written 'about' someone or something, they all just sort of tumble out unannounced, like the worst kind of house guest.

Normally the meaning of the songs, if there is any, occurs to me after I've written the song.

Normally when I'm writing, in the beginning I don't think of lyrics at all. I'm just improvising.

Of course I had the parallel of having the early years of my life being spent during apartheid, and then having a lot of awful poverty going on around me while I lived in this bubble of middle-classness, but I was a child, and I only really started to (I hope) understand all of that fairly recently.

Sometimes it's just the creative intent of an artist or band that inspires me. I'm generally drawn to artists or bands that put themselves out on a limb somewhat and do something that infuriates both the mainstream and the indie purists, but that can't necessarily be classed as either. To me it seems somewhat convenient to be on either end of that scale.

Sometimes, I even learn new techniques from my students. Although I am still a student at the Art Institute, I think that I have learnt a lot from the classes that I have already taken.

The moment you're too apologetic about something and people know that something isn't finished, they listen/look for the mistakes or cracks, but if you act like it's done people experience things in a totally different way.

The music that I listen to the most is probably world music, whether it's from African or South America or all over.

The racial conversation in the States is so multifaceted and multilayered. Obviously it's not always a positive conversation, but it's just so much more detailed than it was when I was growing up in South Africa.

There are literally endless options and possibilities, and often no clear or obvious path in how to make that choice, and nobody to tell you to go this way or that. But somehow, it works itself out if you trust in the process, which is often easier said than done.

There were times when I would suddenly realize making music is a crazy pipe dream. I would see bands that did super well in South Africa still struggling to survive, or even people on the international level who are doing well but financially can't really support themselves.

Trying to be really dark and alienating just felt exhausting to me, so I started going back to the music that I grew up with, whether it was African music or pop music. It took me away from being overly self-conscious about what I was doing.

Unfortunately, there are very few facilities which offer courses in the arts. Not all the secondary schools offer the subject for CXC examinations.

We lived in a suburb in Johannesburg, which is a massive city of about 8 million people, and my parents would drive me to school every day and over the weekend I would go to the mall and then occasionally on Safari. Pretty normal stuff, apart from the Safari.

We need to understand that there is a process of learning and experience and success will stem from this. The painting represents life and the brushstroke represents the steps we take in life.

We should not let negative influences get to us.

What I love about African-African music is how unselfconscious it is in so many ways.

When I start working on an idea, I immediately record without judging it.

When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school.

When I was 10 I went to the Drakensberg Boys Choir School, which is this idyllic Harry Potter-esque music boarding school in the mountains in South Africa, and that's when everything started to change for me and I realised that music is my thing.

When I was developing St. Lucia - around 2008, 2009, at the peak of Pitchfork culture - what was considered cool was being as alienating to your audience as possible.

When I was growing up, it was still during Apartheid, so the country was very shielded from the outside artistic world. Anything that was too subversive was basically banned. All the music that we got from outside of South Africa was the poppiest, least subversive music that you could get.

When I'm writing, those ideas are seldom inspired by music itself. I won't often listen to an artist and come up with an idea.

While painting I noticed a piece of madras cloth on the floor. As usual, my mind started working overtime and a pair of scissors and a small amount of glue later...I created THE COMEDIAN. Everybody loved the uniqueness of the painting. It was indeed a hit.

World music evokes a feeling. You don't have to think about the scene that it comes from.

You may be surprised to know that growing up, I wanted to be a writer of children's books.