Chadillac Green: The Wonderful Wizard of Arts

Chadillac Green:
The Wonderful Wizard of Arts

The Multifaceted Man of Many Mediums
Talks About Tattooing, Murals, Music, and More

By Roger Durling | December 18, 2025

Mural by Green | Credit: Courtesy

Mural by Green | Credit: Courtesy

He moved out of the house after finishing school, because he didn’t want to go to college. When he was 21, he got arrested for tagging SINT. A citizen called the police after seeing him tag a wall that was already full of tags. He was in jail for just one night because they couldn’t find the owner of the store to file charges. His parents weren’t too happy. After that, he started using the name HUEY. “I really liked Huey Lewis and the News,” he says. “HUEY stuck with me.”

Green began tattooing at age 25, trained by Jeremy Latta. At first, he thought it would be great to be doing tattoos and not have a tattoo on his own body. Then he realized that he wanted to see what it was like for himself. “I thought it was cool!” he says. “I got a skull with guns. It was a great feeling.”

Around that time a friend of his, Dan Matic, started calling him Chadillac, and he got a tattoo on his hand with the Cadillac emblem. The name stuck. The last name “Green” came about when he signed up for Instagram. Chadillac Green was born. 

“I have always lived by an alias,” he says. “In graffiti, you always have a name.” And in that spirit, he asked me to refrain from using his real name in this story.

“Excuse Me?” (left) and “Cool Like That”  by Chadillac Green  Credit: Courtesy

Sixteen years ago, Green was ready to get out of Missouri. At first, he thought he would move to New York, but after visiting San Diego, he fell in love with California. Through mutual friends, he was introduced to Kenny Knox, who at the time co-owned 805 Ink on State Street with JJ Ortiz. Green did a guest spot for five days in 2008 during Fiesta, and six months later, he moved here.

“He is one of the best at connecting with his customers,” says Knox. “Effortlessly friendly, but also stern when he sees someone making a bad choice. Good tattoo artists know when to end a bad train of thought. All that aside, he is a very well-rounded tattooer.” 

When he started working in Santa Barbara, Chadillac knew he needed to up his game. “You have to be more perfect,” he says. “Tattooing is 100 percent damage control.” His work is now instantly recognizable. His tattoos look clean and are done in a palette of blacks and grays. He keeps a book of line drawings that he works on to this day in his free time. He still works at 805 Ink Monday through Friday.

“I didn’t paint on canvas until I came to Santa Barbara 15 years ago,” Chadillac says. “I needed to express myself in art besides tattooing. At first, if I painted on canvas, it was graffiti. It was weird. I didn’t know what I was doing.” He wasn’t mixing the paint before application. He would do it directly on the canvas. Eventually, he figured it out. Because he was trained in graffiti — doing things that were illegal — he works really fast. He started doing paintings of skulls because that’s what he was into at the time. Then he progressed to owls, but gave up because friends started calling him the Owl Man.

Around 2014, I saw an arresting exhibit of his in the basement of Fuzion, where he featured a series of famous people who get high, including The Dude, Cheech and Chong, Willie Nelson, and Notorious BIG. All with very bright neon backgrounds.

“I like the challenge of doing murals,” he reveals. “It’s fun. I like painting big. It’s hard for me to paint small.”

Green’s first mural was at the now-closed REDS in the Funk Zone. It was called “Life Is a Voyage” and depicted an old couple. He calls that mural his footprint in this town. Ralph Lauren did an ad shoot in front of it.

He has now painted several murals in our city, but none as impactful as the memorial to George Floyd painted during COVID with his close friend, the late artist Danny Meza. From the start, there were strong reactions to it, both positive and negative. The mural emblazoned with the words “Black Lives Matter” started being vandalized. “People would write vulgar things,” Green remembers. “As soon as it was fixed, somebody else would damage it. To keep it up was too much. That was heavy, to see how it affected people. Watching people react to it.”

Chadillac has been married to Teresa Westmoreland for two years now, after dating for seven. She’s a chocolatier working in Carpinteria and also an artist. She paints and does jewelry, and both husband and wife create in the same room together. He is also proud to be a stepdad to her son, Jude, and it has earned him a new alias — Jude calls him Step Chad or CHADA.

Asked about all the creative facets of his life, Chadillac says they are all separate. “But they balance me,” he says. “Canvas painting, murals, tattoos, deejaying, and family life … they are different alleyways to me. I’m thankful that I am able to be an artist.”