Justice Laub (Good Energy)

From the moment I met Justice, I knew we were going to be friends. Living up to his alias “Good Energy”, he radiates positivity. Within minutes of meeting, I found myself inviting him to stay at my home and offering to give him a tour of Northwestern Washington.

As with many of the creatives that get pulled into my orbit, I met Justice through his art before I met him. I had the honor of viewing a few of his unreleased digital illustrations, which were alive, spiritual, and full of joy. His vibrant color palette, energetic lines, and fantastical anthropomorphic shapes mingled, beckoning me to join their party and move along with the music. They looked like visions from an alternate alien dimension that’s even more fun than this one. Without any information on the art or the artist, I could tell these illustrations were produced by someone with a unique way of looking at the world. I had to get his story.

Magical Lord Frostine
Acrylic on Canvas
72 x 31 inches
Collected by Paul Macrae

It would be a month after my sneak peak at those funky, mood-elevating pieces till I finally got to meet the artist himself. Discovering the inspiration behind each piece, and how his personal background informs his art, adds another facet to his multidimensional pieces.

Justice grew up, as he says, “taking a short yellow bus”. He explained that while he was not diagnosed with a specific condition, his school decided there was a great enough delta between his reading and writing skills and those of the rest of his class. He was placed into an ILP, or Individual Learning Plan, a highly customized education program for children who do not test well in the traditional education system. Reflecting on this experience, he described this period of his life as being in the unique position of feeling set apart from everyone, but being seen as an “archetypal white male”, and being treated as such by those who did not know him. This made him feel like he could not identify with any of the groups he was a part of because he didn’t fully fit in to any of them. He also felt like he couldn’t identify with other people who were categorized as “different” for physical traits, because his being “different” was not treated the same way.

He believed that the education system’s focus on standardized testing barred him from college. Feeling forced to find a different path, he moved to LA and became a bike messenger on the Paramount lot. While delivering packages and news, he became friends with executives and found himself in conversations about the future of the intersection of marketing and technology—conversations that prepared him for what was to come.

Years later, Justice was painting a giant watercolor mural in his apartment building when his roommate, a consultant at E! Entertainment, started asking him questions about what to do with smartphones. Justice shared a few ideas and his roommate hired him as an assistant.

As an assistant, Justice sat in on meetings and observed how people at an executive level operated. Over time, this work experience trained him to become a consultant, a position where he says “the sky is the limit for how much people are willing to pay to synthesize information” and “they don’t care what your grades were in school”. Starting his career making minimum wage as a bike messenger—a position he felt he was limited to because of his learning disability—then becoming a consultant showed Justice that “there are different ladders in life”. He connected this awareness to his memories of going to Grateful Dead concerts with his parents where he saw “an alternative to the mainstream” and realized that “there’s all these different ways to navigate through reality.”

This life experience made him realize that there are different perspectives around the same idea and countless ways to accomplish the same goal—a concept that he brings into his art. With each piece, he encourages the viewer to look at their reality in new ways. When someone encounters a wall, he wants to inspire them to go over the wall, or around it, or find a secret door and go through it.