Skateboards
are their canvas
Skateboards
(some without the wheels) are more than just wooden planks — they
are canvases for artistic expression
By
Taryn Plumb
GLOBE
CORRESPONDENT
OCTOBER
19, 2011
Close
your eyes and imagine you’re meandering through an art museum.
Maybe there’s a Warhol nearby, an iconic Pop Art soup can. In
another gallery, a Degas, his elegant ballerinas in their frothy
tutus. Elsewhere, ancient statues, their details dulled by millennia.
And
then, amid all that, hanging bottoms-up, sans wheels, covered with
abstracts and geometrics and landscapes and portraits - a collection
of skateboards?
“It’s
a medium, not just a wooden plank,’’ said Vanessa Ly, of Malden,
a 27-year-old artist who exhibits and sells boards with conceptual
designs. “There’s form to it, there’s texture. It’s a fun
medium to work with, an interesting medium to work with.’’
Decks
have long been a means of artistic expression and individuality among
skateboarders. But now these functional works of art are beginning to
ride the rim between the cultural periphery and the mainstream.
Influenced
by Frank Miller or Jackson Pollock or Picasso, artists are exhibiting
boards in fine art (and not-so-fine art) galleries. They hang in
cafes, bars, and tattoo parlors. They’re amassed in the homes of
private collectors and celebrity skaters.
Classically
trained artists are lured by their form and their edge. Public art
projects like Duxbury Art Association’s annual Skateboard Art
Challenge encourage them as a medium. Local skate shops have even
opened their own gallery spaces.
Skateboard
art “is crossing the line into more of a legitimacy,’’
acknowledged Evan Kanarakis, 36, founder of Devil Street Decks in
Portland, Maine, whose roughly 10 freelance artists based around the
world (including in and around Boston) create and sell original
artwork boards.
But,
he added, “it’s still on the fringe of what art is. First and
foremost, it’s a skateboard.’’
Meaning
that, no matter how creative the designs that decorate its underside,
it’s meant to be ridden - and not just hang on the wall.
Many
skateboard artists like to see the scratches, gouges, hunks ripped
out by curbs, and “truck bites’’ (when spinning wheels take a
slice out of the board’s edge) that come with attempting and
mastering tricks. It means their art is alive, that it’s
appreciated. (Still, some do prefer that their hand-designed
prototypes not be subjected to the rough treatment of the street.)
“It
is introducing something usable, it is an interactive art form,’’
said James A. Fox of Peabody, who designs for Devil Street Decks.
“This is art that people will see every single day.’’
And
when someone wants to ride your art?
“That’s
pretty sick,’’ said Fox, dressed in black, multiple piercings on
his ears.
Many
boards have a graffiti, graphic arts, graphic novel, or comic book
feel, while others are clearly more influenced by high art. A few
artists even refashion used or broken boards into various forms of
sculpture.
Typically,
designs cover the bottom of the board, because that’s what’s
visible when skaters go airborne, but also, because the top is
covered with grip tape and often gets the most wear. Fittingly,
though, some artists defy even this convention, especially in the
case of longboards, which are used more for traveling than tricks.
“There
are no rules on style,’’ Kanarakis explained.
That’s
obvious in the work of Devil Street’s menagerie of artists: Some
boards feature homages to Pollock, with drips and dribbles and
splotches and scratches. Others boast geometric designs and are heavy
with patterns of distorted flowers and sunbursts. Still others are
irreverent - cans of spray paint (or, at least, what look like it)
come to life, with beaks and arms; weird cylindrical houses with
trees growing out of them.
Ly,
who works in an architecture firm and doesn’t skateboard (although,
she freely admits with a laugh, she’s “attempted’’), creates
stencil-and-spray paint designs with a touch of whimsy and mysterious
juxtaposition: A flower phonograph; gnarled trees; a dark, rambling
tree house.
Fox,
meanwhile, uses spray paint and acrylics to create graffiti-esque
takes on Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam’’;
graphic-styled angels; and a series of long-legged femme fatales with
capes of red hair, cigarettes, and smoking guns.
A
blank skateboard is “raw and interesting,’’ said Fox, a cook by
profession who holds an art education degree and looks younger than
his 45 years. He added that he finds absolutely “no excitement’’
in a plain canvas.
Mykim
Dang also finds traditional canvas quite bland. She hasn’t worked
with anything but skateboards for several years.
A
24-year-old Boston-based video producer, who goes by “M’’ for
short, Dang started riding and designing in high school, and now
exhibits regularly and sells custom and manufactured pieces through
her company, Dichotomy Skateboards, which she founded with a
childhood friend.
Almost
exclusively portraiture, her pieces are inspired from seconds-long
interactions with strangers or people she sees on the street. They
are ethereal and shadowed images of men, women, children. They may be
close up, distant, silhouetted, partially hidden, stoic, praying,
biting their nails, smoking cigarettes.
She’s
intrigued by a board’s restricted space, the format and the wood
itself. Ultimately, she said, “I really want to challenge the norms
of what is considered art.’’
Others
do this by basing designs around a board’s former, mostly airborne,
existence.
Ben
MacAdam, for instance, has crafted abstract shapes out of the
lacerations, exposed wood, missing chunks, and chewed-up surfaces of
used boards.
“It
was part of the life they lived,’’ MacAdam said as he stood in #5
Gallery on Rocky Neck, two of his pieces hanging nearby.
“You
can see people had fun with these boards,’’ agreed Joe
Brancaleone, a 24-year-old longboarder who runs the custom design
enterprise Hemoglobin Boarding Co. of Gloucester and plans to exhibit
at #5 Gallery.
His
shop’s designs? Coiled cobras, an awakening Frankenstein, a
menacing Grim Reaper (is there any other kind?), sexy sailor girls -
all hand-painted by a handful of artists.
MacAdam
stepped back to examine several displayed on the wall. “You don’t
have to be a hardcore skateboarder to appreciate it,’’ he said,
shrugging. “These could be in somebody’s house or . . .’’
Brancaleone
finished: “Underneath someone.’’
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