Katch 1 has been drawing since he could hold a pencil. Art was something he always enjoyed. It was always a part of his life.

Raised in Hawaii, Katch discovered his love for graffiti and for skateboarding as a pre-teen. Soon after his first spray painting experience, Katch’s neighbor helped him discover skateboarding. If Katch wasn’t drawing or writing, he found himself on his skateboard.

After graduating from high school, Katch moved to San Francisco to immerse himself into the cutting edge Bay Area graffiti scene. When Katch got there, rather than painting, he skateboarded and immersed himself into the extremely progressive Bay Area DJ scene.
  
As he watched the commercial graffiti industry swell and blow up in the early 1990s, he decided to move to Los Angeles in hopes of getting a job doing his passion: graffiti art. After weeks of sleeping on a friend’s couch and of unsuccessfully job-hunting at restaurants and stores, Katch 1 attended an action sports tradeshow in San Diego. He went in with just his blackbook and photos, and walked out with several job offers. From there, he worked for Conart, the first urban graffiti-based t-shirt company in Los Angeles.

When Katch was living in L.A., he became fascinated with the freight trains that he passed by him everyday on the freeway. After painting a few trains, he heard that people saw and photographed his trains in locations as far as New Jersey and Toronto. Katch was immediately hooked. Instead of the more popular boxcars, he chose the “hopper” freights, which allowed Katch to paint whole car trains, complete with letters, backgrounds, and characters. In the early nineties, when Katch hopped over a fence to take pictures of his first complete whole car, JUST 195 of NASA / AWR / MSK / TATS CRU approached him.  The two immediately bonded, and through JUST 195, Katch was introduced to some of L.A.’s most notorious graffiti artists and he painted in some of L.A.’s most famous graffiti yards. Eventually, around 1994, Katch 1 and a friend started Natural Koncept, a small  skateboarding company which featured his artwork.

In 2008, Katch released a 256 page self titled book featuring twenty years of his artwork. Mainly residing in Los Angeles, Katch traveled frequently back and forth from Hawaii. Eventually he moved permanently back to Hawaii in 2010 to raise his family. He currently resides in Honolulu.

Katch still draws all the artwork and does filming and editing of Natural Koncept’s skateboard videos. He also paint murals, skateboards, freelances, and works at Banzai Tattoo Shop in Pearl City as a full-time tattoo artist.