This is a story about choices. How we make them, where we make them, and what they lead us to. Because you can either choose to spend your life in a lab coat, or to spend it making images that express your inner self—only to realize how much of the world shares the pictures in your head.
Our travel guide for this story is a Hamilton resident named Joe Hodnicki, who made the choice between lab coat and surf shorts in St. John’s. The Virgin Island, not the college or the church. Hodnicki’s college was actually Drexel, where he went at the behest of his father to study molecular biology.
Hodnicki grew up with a pencil as a sixth digit on his drawing hand. “My whole life revolved around creating everything I can,” he says. “A dream was to work for Disney. I had a huge architectural drafting table, and all I wanted to do was draw.”
By 17, Hodnicki needed to make his first real grown-up choice about what to do with his life. His father, a mechanic who owned his own garage, explained to him that a career as an artist is a lot tougher one to do well than a career as something practical. Something that comes with formal job opportunities and chances for advancement and steady paychecks.
So Drexel it was, to study engineering. Then science. Then pre-med. And, finally. molecular biology, which is what Hodnicki has his bachelor’s degree in. But don’t get the wrong idea about Hodnicki’s parents. They were always incredibly supportive of his creative side. In fact, they saved every drawing he had made, from when he was a little boy.
And don’t get the wrong idea about Hodnicki’s college path. Yes, he studied sciences and engineering, and yes, he really tried to nurture that side of himself. But when you turn your college room into an art studio, bells go off eventually.
So, in 2003, with his bachelor’s firmly in hand, Hodnicki made his choice to go to St. John’s and figure out what to do.
Hodnicki left for St. John’s a young 20-something with zero idea what he was going to do once he got there. He just knew that as a former lifeguard, surfer, beach guy and restless spirit, he wanted to be on the water.
When he got to St. John’s, Hodnicki walked straight off the ferry and up to a shack of a bar five feet from the water, sat down and put his feet in the water. He realized he needed a job. A friend had told him of a tree house resort—yes, that’s a thing—so Hodnicki walked over to it and got a job, trading his labor there for free room, board and food. He’d gotten about half his college paid for through scholarships (“Because I asked”), so he was less worried about how much debt was going to swallow him. And he decided, to hell with it, he was following his love of art.
For a while, he bartended to help make ends meet while he built his own company, OKOTO Apparel, for which he designed apparel graphics, catalogues and advertising visuals, and which he named after his custom surfboard shaping business. Both businesses were founded in 2003.
From then through 2010, OKOTO “grew into a production company of sorts,” with merchandise sold online and in retail stores all over the East Coast, he says. As a result, Hodnicki was invited to take part in events across the country. In the meantime served as a brand ambassador and product designer for Adaptive Action Sports, which creates and promotes action sports camps, events and programs for physically disabled young people.
And, it turns out that Hodnicki’s nonprofit work has become a major piece of his artistic life. He has worked for numerous non- and not-for-profit organizations and events, including Special Olympics, Women On Waves, SurfAid, the New York Surf Film Festival, the San Diego Surf Film Festival and WAVES for Development.
Morgan Rae Berk, founder of the New York Surf Film Festival, says she met Hodnicki when he volunteered to design the T-shirts for the festival.
“He created an amazing drawing that mixed New York City elements—subway art—with surf and film,” she says. “Quite a unique end result that perfectly answered the question we always got—there’s surfing in New York?”
Berk says Hodnicki “got what we were trying to do,” which was to bring light to surfing in New York, as well as to international filmmakers who have “this serious and amazing craft and needed a stage as large as NYC to showcase it.”
Dave Aabo, founder and executive director of WAVES for Development, a not-for-profit corporation that blends innovative tourism programs for youth with service and adventure through surfing, met Hodnicki at a SurfAid event in New York about five years ago.
Put simply, “Joe is the man,” Aabo says. “From five years ago to upcoming events in 2016, Joe has remained committed to supporting the WAVES mission. The shared surfing experience that Joe can convey is authentic. He’s not depicting something that he’s unfamiliar with. He’s sharing his stoke with us.”
That phrase—Sharing the Stoke—is not mere surfer hyperbole. That’s actually the name of Hodnicki’s business today, and is the name of the website from which he captains his ever-sailing ship through the often choppy waters of life as a professional artist.
The salient point in these experiences Hodnicki had around the country have helped him understand that while he loved his apparel business, running a business like that is a ton of hard work, much of it not art. But his time working with organization and events kept him grounded and motivated him to his first true love: Art. He launched his art business in 2008 and has yet to look back, even if he’s not making lab tech money.
“I need to be a working artist,” the 36-year-old said. “Money always comes second to me.”
One of the events Hodnicki got to experience up close in an almost purely artistic way was the Winter X-Games in 2012, for which Hodnicki designed the medals. He entered his designs for consideration because why not, and was continually stunned to see his name among the ever-decreasing list of finalists. The medal designs also got him work designing the visual presence at the 2012 Winter X-Games Village for the online video channel Vimeo.
The reality of all this didn’t hit him, he says, until he was in Aspen, Colorado, looking at the medal he’d designed hanging around the neck of snowboarder Shaun White. He wondered just how his life and career had gotten him to such an unusual moment.
Well, a lot had to do with putting his feet in the water at St. John’s. Because that decision not to work in a lab and get advanced degrees led him to numerous things that make him feel like the luckiest guy going. And that includes having met Heather Laslo four years ago.
Laslo is Hodnicki’s fiancée, and though he met her in New Jersey, he says he never would have met her had he chosen the science career path.
“I use to bartend at nights a few days a week to get that side money,” Hodnicki says. “While Heather was in nursing school, she stopped in to visit her friend who also worked there, to return a phone charger she left in class. She was in and out, and when she left, I couldn’t help but tell her friend I thought she was cute.”
Hodnicki’s coworker told Laslo, of course, but the future fiancée wasn’t impressed when she saw Hodnicki’s Facebook page. Due to Facebook’s privacy settings, when she looked him up, it only showed a couple photos—him dancing with his sister at her wedding, and some shots with his nephews.
“Needless to say, she thought I was married with kids, and I was being a creep,” he says. “After some questioning on her part to her friend, and some well-deserved persistence on my end, we hung out one night, and talked until 4 a.m., and the rest is history.”
The couple got engaged this past June in their vintage camper.
And that thought is inconceivable to him, because, he says, she is perfect for him—a nurse who’s so down to earth that their first time hanging out at his place, she showed up in sweats. She’s also adventurous and silly. In fact, it was her idea to wear an octopus as a hat for a photo shoot connected to Hodnicki’s latest project. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
In the meantime, there is Hodnicki’s foray into the full-on corporate world. In 2014, he went to work for Urban Outfitters in New York, as a designer for the company’s home division. He managed a graphics team that designed all manner of home items, and the experience gave him critical insight into what it takes to design and sell merchandise.
Which leads us to the octopus on Laslo’s head. Hodnicki left Urban Outfitters this past June, grateful and educated but with a burning urge to step out in yet another new direction. That direction manifested as a series of home items that bear his distinctive surf/street art signature.
The first round of Hodnicki’s new venture as an artist/merchandiser is a series of mugs featuring a stylized kraken grabbing at a small ship. But look closely and you’ll see that the ship is not upended, nor is it running from a fight. It’s meeting its tormenter head-on and driving straight through.
Hodnicki has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help him raise the $15,000 he needs to do the business right, he says. Having worked for Urban Outfitters, he learned to delegate aspects of his business. That he doesn’t have to do every single thing from design to manufacture to distribution. He wants to hire—and pay well—people who do these other aspects of business, so that he can spend more time creating and making images than trying to sell merchandise.
So maybe this is a story about determination. Of a guy who, with no formal art education, has somehow navigated the kraken-infested waters of the real world and lived to tell the tale. Of someone who’s made it his mission to live out the life he wanted in the way he wants, and damn the krakens and lab coats.
Maybe. But actually, this has been a story about choices and adventures and art and work and passions and creativity and true loves that come along with it, and the determination to keep sailing toward new horizons, no matter what’s under the surface grabbing at you with its suckers of doom.
“I feel limitless,” Hodnicki says. “Without formal training, I got from there to here and I didn’t stop. I feel like I can do anything, I just need to narrow my focus to doing one thing at a time.”
For more on Hodnicki, go online to sharingthestoke.com.
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