Slate was born on a transpacific crossing of a Cunard Line Ship during turbulent seas while his mother Victoria “Vicky” McGee, an esteemed mathematician, was returning from speaking engagements in Japan. You could say he began his journey on a rough note but the plucky artist came into this world with gusto, biting his umbilical cord free a mere seconds after birth with a full set of teeth. His father Stanley Quagmier was a moonshiner and sometime gambler possessing a devil-may-care attitude and an auditor-may-care income. The two had met when Vicky stumbled upon Stan's still during a hike in the Adirondack Mountains. They had a whirlwind courtship resulting in Vicky spending increasingly more time with Stan at his woodsy hideout while neglecting her research in discrete geometry. Shunning cliché dating rituals they preferred to pass the time drinking fractions off the still staring longingly into each other's eyes on sultry nights during marathon games of Fly Loo. After Stan hit a statistically inexplicable losing streak wherein not a single fly landed on his sugar cube in days, he was deeply indebted to Vicky. He decided it was more convenient to marry than pay her the exorbitant sum. However, their plans were thwarted when the law descended on Stan's still, putting a delay on their nuptials.

The two were eventually married by a prison chaplain while Stan was serving a stint in Sing Sing and Vicky was deeply entrenched in solving the Happy Ending Problem. To their mutual delight Stan was released only months later on parole. The union would prove to be a brief and unhappy one, lasting only a year. Upon the instant she discovered she was pregnant, Vicky came to the simultaneous conclusions that the notion of a happy ending was absurd and, if it takes a minimum of 17 randomly distributed points to guarantee a convex hexagon can be found among them, then that was good enough for her.

Her book The Happy Ending Problem: A story of Love, Divorce and Math became a bestseller. Ever the restless soul, she decided to promote it while still pregnant. With child in utero she headed west, first by train then by sea until she reached Asia, lecturing along the way at various train stops and ports of call. Late in her third trimester she boarded a ship that would return her to America two weeks before her due date, giving her plenty of time to find a place to settle down with her new baby. The little one would prove to be as restless as his mother, arriving ten days early in an event that Vicky described as “highly improbable.”

Wishing a fresh start, she decided to name him Slate, inspired by the pleasant feelings she experienced when erasing a chalk-board to begin a new math problem. Immediately after his birth and still delirious from exhaustion, she decided that she must choose a place for them to settle before she slept. The captain of the ship handed her a world atlas to which she turned to the very last page, picking the final listing. Thus concluding that the end of the atlas was the perfect place to make a new beginning, she set her sights on the enclave of Zzyzx, California.

Life for Vicky and Slate was effortless and fulfilling. Vicky regularly published papers and gave lectures freelance, exclusively earning a living off of her book. Slate took to the desert environment like a duck to water or more aptly like a cold-blooded reptile to warm sunshine. Although life was mostly idyllic, Slate was growing up fatherless. This was the result of Vicky having forbidden Stan from visiting their son, fearing he would be a bad influence.

Slate took up an interest in art at an early age after a fencing accident left him blinded in one eye. Afterward, Slate became fixated on his remaining sight, training himself to draw and paint from his monocular perspective. He intensively honed his skills, using them to express his singular vision. Zzyzx proved to be the perfect incubator for a budding artist. Creativity was celebrated and he was surrounded by others pursuing different avenues including interpretive dance, sand painting, tree dwelling, moon howling and giving birth in exotic outdoor locations. Slate's talent was recognized early when he won an honorable mention in his age category in the Montessori school's semi-annual art show for his finger painting depicting his neighbor Sally giving birth under a cactus, thus granting him the validation he needed to pursue painting as a career.

When Slate was fifteen Vicky took sick with cancer and couldn't care for her son and wished that he not see her suffer. Temporarily suspending her anxieties about his larcenous influence, she sent him to live with his father, who had resettled in Louisiana. Fortunately Stan's finances had changed for the better since Slate's birth due to a successful restaurant venture. The food was lackluster but the business was highly profitable thanks to Stan's incorporating his home-distilled spirits into the bar. Doing so saved money twofold as he didn't have to buy as much alcohol or declare as much income due to a lack of declared inventory. His vodka martinis were indistinguishable from Manhattans given his propensity for topping off his stock with moonshine.

Although finally cohabiting with his estranged father, his laid-back California attitude clashed with the laissez-faire southern culture of Louisiana, leaving him extremely unpopular with his classmates. Building a relationship between father and son after years of absence was also proving difficult. Both parties struggled to see the other's point of view. Finding himself in isolation, he drew and painted himself the friends he didn't have. Unable to find sitters for his portraits, he build crude constructions of straw stuffed into discarded clothes, topped with paper smiley faces for heads. He then rendered the paintings of these posed surrogates in a painfully realistic styling. In the meantime, Slate tried filling his emotional void with fried oysters and beignets, two discoveries readily incorporated into his routine. This resulted in a large weight gain that he carried with him until college. The straw friends proved highly serendipitous when Stan fashioned them into an escape raft after the flood waters from Hurricane Katrina had engulfed the first floor of their home. The tentatively reconciled duo embarked on their voyage at dawn two days after the flood had begun. A heart-warming scene ensued when older and younger realized that the combination of the fruitage of the younger's failed social life having physically manifested itself in trifling art and the older's hard-nosed DIY pragmatic ingenuity had saved not only the corporeal flesh of the pair but also the psychosocial integrity of their relationship.

Spared from the floodwater by storing his works in the attic, Slate submitted to various college admissions boards a portfolio of his imitation friends playing poker. His earnest if pathetic attempt at human connection was mistaken for a daringly dour take on the concept of authenticity in history of portraiture. The reviewers assumed his position was that a true representation of a person's character was impossible, thus relegating portraiture to the demeaningly rote task of displaying the endless permutations of all that is superficial and fictive in the human experience. His droll paintings opened the doors to an array of schools, ultimately settling on the University of Rhode Island because they offered a full scholarship.

Rhode Island proved to be the breath of fresh air that he thought it could be and as welcoming as he could have imagined. His mother's cancer had gone into remission a year before his arrival setting a hopeful tone for his studies there. Slate's experience at URI was a happy one studying art and chemistry. No longer forced to paint straw dummies, he relished the opportunity to paint people in the flesh. Although personally happy, his direct and sentimental depictions of real people enjoying their lives and engaging in the activities they actually do were perceived as naive, uninformed, and irrelevant by his professor. His classmates considered his painting of real friends playing poker a dismal failure until one audacious viewer suggested it was actually a second-degree self-mockery of his earlier painting of straw people playing poker. This dual trickery was suddenly well received, and he once again found himself in good favor until a classmate pulled off a hat trick of conceptual twists by executing a sculpture of the painting of the Mona Lisa, frame and all, itself made entirely out of paint chips that had been scraped off of sculptures.

Slate fared notably average in chemistry finding objectively proven scientific truths a welcome relief from the subjectively circular logic of the art world. Armed with a new rhetoric, he caught the dorm burglar who stole people's keys while they showered and scoured their rooms. Slate covered a bait key with silver nitrate and left it tantalizingly on top of a towel, such that the chemical blackened the unsuspecting burglar's hand. The school newspaper ran a story of Slate's vigilante efforts , making him almost famous for about a week. Inspired by his success he also went on to employ chemicals for novel amusement. Upon learning that bromocresol blue—if disguised in something dark like coffee—can be administered harmlessly to an unsuspecting individual, turning their urine an alarmingly blue hue when it passes, he laced his roommate's cola at lunch. Slate was disappointed to discover his color-blind roommate mistook his darker urine for dehydration. He confessed his fail to an art professor who later employed the technique on sabbatical to create a series of “water colors.”

The summer after his freshman year, he took an internship with an alternative energy start-up in the Dordogne region of France. The Spartan living accommodations were several miles from the company headquarters on a small farm that was home to all sorts of common livestock. He was hired to grow algae as part of a biofuels project but—not being a biologist—he failed miserably. The alcoholic owner threatened to send him back early declaring that a jar of his own urine could grow algae better than he could. The man's personal experiments with several gallons of his waste proved fruitless, ending the debate there. The lab space was nothing more than a barn, requiring the lab bench to be cleared of snails daily before the experiments began. The stallion that lived at the other end was constantly begging for oats, never giving him a moment's peace to concentrate. Fortunately the owner spent his days offsite at headquarters, which was a mixed blessing as once again Slate found himself in the isolation he grew up with. Falling back on familiar coping mechanisms, he spent most of his time with cows, drawing them in his sketchbook. He would have eaten himself into a higher BMI had he and his colleagues not been slowly running out of food since his arrival there. Instead, their nightly dinners had shrunk in size causing him to lose ten pounds. Toward the end of his stay, he documented the ethereal gaze of the cows through photography as source material for future paintings. Slate left the internship early when the start-up filed for bankruptcy due to a severe mismanagement of resources. At the train platform, the start-up owner unable to accept his folly, babbled incoherently about how he would save the world through alternative energy and about the finer points of how to mix alcohol with hypnotics. Slate wasn't sure he learned anything at the internship beyond how to catch an escaped goose, how to catch an escaped goat, how to pull a dog out of a well, how to catch an escaped horse, or how to rouse a drunken boss at 7:00 am.

After fulfilling his obligations at the farm, Slate traveled throughout Europe looking at art, soaking in the sedate grandeur emanating from the relics of empires past. Previously a student of Modernism he found himself developing a taste for Golden Age Dutch still life, Neoclassicism, Romanticism and 19th–century realism. Slate incorporated these influences into a series of cow paintings that he eventually worked on after returning to California, and enrolling in a graduate program at UCLA. Slate joined the Los Angeles Art Association and has been painting ever since.