There were mornings as a young child that Nes Andrion yearned for the mother who he says left him behind in the Philippines at the tender age of 8 months old and times his stomach burned with hunger from so many inadequate meals – too often just bread and coffee, even as a toddler. There were days, he says, his feet grew sore from having no shoes and his back ached from sleeping on a hard dirt floor – "just a bed sheet, no pillow," he recalls.
Through it all, though, a simple dream carried him.
The kid was an artist. The kid could draw. He could create. He reveled in the moment it all came together.
And so, sure, Nes Andrion grew up about as poor as you can in this world – "rock bottom," he says – raised by his aunt and uncle, in a tiny, crowded house on the side of the steep, thick mountains above Olongapo City, the Filipino port town.
He always saw something bigger, though. He saw art. His art, splashed across countries he could hardly fathom, seen by millions of
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