Medium: India ink, pen and ink, watercolor, gesso on old skateboard deck
Price: Not for sale.
This is the first skateboard I ever had. Well, the first real skateboard (my first actual skateboard was this old-school sidewalk surfer thing that was about four inches side–different story though). This board, a G&S Billy Ruff pro model, had white Tracker trucks and bright green urethane Cross Bones wheels. It was awesome. I skated it just about every day. The top is rippled and warped from all the times I skated in the rain. I unearthed it from my parents’ basement not too long ago and immediately got after it with an orbital sander and some varnish with a very clear image in my mind of what I wanted to create.
During the prep/reconstruction process it slowly occurred to me that this deck is a quarter-century old. Holy crap. That’s old. With this in mind, I set to create on a pseudo-self portrait and tweaked my original plan. I think the final product conveys the many ways in which memories can make a person feel older than they actually are. The span of time has a funny way of creating this feeling of split personality–like it was someone else that owned this skateboard as a little kid. And the guy that just painted on it is someone else entirely.
I entered this piece into a peer-juried art show a few months back and won. The night of the show I almost backed out. Told my wife I didn’t think this piece was any good, that people wouldn’t really get it. Driving home from the show that night I decided that from now I’ll quit trying to figure out what people like and don’t like and just keep painting…