Internal Combustion Painting

“Painting is not something I can just do on a weekend. When I create something, it’s fulfilling a need I have.” – Topher The famous lyric from the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger proclaims that “You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.” The life journey of Topher Essex mirrors this statement with great similarity. Twenty years of chasing the American dream of healthy finances, a successful business, and a house with a white picket fence left Topher empty and void. It was at one of those rock bottom places that life brings us to that Topher who found inspiration and his true calling for his second chapter. He found what he needed. He needed art. He needed it every day. Topher was born and raised in Southern California with an eye towards the world of art at an early age. His love of artistic expression was cultivated through his strong relationship with his grandmother. He sat for hours upon hours watching his prolific grandmother paint with beautiful strokes as she made the world around her come to life on canvas. She painted hundreds of times. Her passion and zeal for art inspired Topher’s love of the visual arts. After graduating from high school, Topher pursued his passion of artistic expression through photography by taking classes at local junior colleges. His knowledge and experience grew through the training he received in photography, mixed media and painting. Photography started as a simple hobby but soon blossomed in to a small business. Topher moved to the Pacific Northwest in his early twenties and started a business to make a living while also running his own photo studio. Freelance photography kept him busy during any spare time. An extensive traveler, Topher once shot 125 rolls of film, in three weeks as he traveled 2,500 miles throughout the beautiful tundra of Alaska. He was in the stock photography business for a while, traveling throughout the United States to capture anything and everything with his lens. But soon life came to a crashing halt. That selfish pursuit of money, greed and status, of searching for all of the things he thought would make him happy failed. Through addictions to drugs and alcohol, Topher lost everything: his business, his family, his accumulated wealth. He hit rock bottom.