Born on his mothers thirty-fourth birthday Jaime F. Crespo spent the first eleven years of his life moving around southern and northern California before settling in the capital of Sacramento. "Moving around so much and always being the new kid I seemed to have found a penchant for drawing, music and sports. I used the sports as more of a social thing. You know, to meet other kids and fit into the new environment as quickly as possible. The art and music...well, that I kept to myself. That was for me only."

However, it wasn't long before Jaime's artistic talents would be found out and that is when he began absorbing his environment and attempting to reconstruct it into a two-dimensional world. "I was influenced by a ton of stuff as a kid. For comics I was never into the super hero stuff. It was just too over my head. I preferred the art work of R. Crumb, Gilbert Sheldon, Dave Sheridan and Robert Armstrong and most importantly Rick Griffin. Then the older cats that came up before them such as Windsor McKay and George Herriman. Then there was Picasso, Diego Rivera and Edward Hopper and most importantly the Mexican broadside genius, Jose Guadalupe Posada. Still, the other influences that were far outside of the art world that would be just as important to me were elements from my Chicano heritage and the Chicano movement to Willie Mays or boxcar art to the Dogtown/Z-boys surf/skate movement. It was and still is heavy, influential art to me!"

Jaime considers his work folk art more so than just mere comics. "They say that a picture can say a thousand words, but I like to draw a thousand pictures and write just as many words to get my stories across." His work has appeared in numerous publications since his artistic beginnings of the late 1970's in his native Sacramento, California and has continued throughout the world to this day. "I've tried my hand at painting pictures where they are as about as close as I could get to the actual subject I was painting. Then one day I noticed how just about everyone else who was doing paintings were doing the exact same thing. You know, trying to make their painting look as realistic as they could. That's when I wanted to have my own voice and put my stamp on my work."

Jaime has a unique primitive style in his work, which seems to come right from the heart. From comic strips, to longer pieces in comic books and chap books to illustrations they all have a very, deep soulful almost naïve essence that gets right to the core. "I suppose most people that do this kind of stuff rely on their past experiences and what has occurred in their lives and then they draw from that experience and hope that it translates into their respective medium."

Jaime has had works appear in publications such as: X-Ray magazine, Deadbeat Magazine, SF Bay Guardian, Harpoon, North Bay Bohemian, The Aardvark, Haight/Ashbury Literary Review, Prism, La Vida de Puerto Rico and many others. He has also had comic books and pieces appear in Slave Labor Graphics, Fantagraphics, Kapow!, Monkey Wrench, Dreams and several others. Jaime continues to churn out work from his tiny studio located over a taqueria in down town San Rafael, California. His work continues to appear in solo and group art shows as well as his illustrations and comic strip, Slice O' Life appearing in weekly publications.

Hoskins Firth
February 2006