Splendid Ear Torture pt.2

This time, it’s Matt Hensley’s turn to ‘enjoy’ a very thick slice of French accent. Right here.

Blogsclusive⎜Jahmal Williams: “American Dream was more about Black enpowerment”

(All photos by Tonophoto)

Here’s the little compensatory trick for having let this blog unkempt for so long: one of my favorite skater’s own favorite pro-models, just for the blog and not the page in Skateboarder, for once. I’ll try to have a few more other blog-only surprises like this in 2010, so consider it a resolution -even though you alas know how New Years resolution go usually.
This said, I won’t insult your Droorstalgic intelligence by introducing the flying Bostonian, Jahmal Williams, who never left the game since the Molotov days and pretty much should deservedly take it over through his company Hopps, one of the very few graphically exciting board companies in this day and age.  Also, let’s be fair, I’ll take every chance I’ll get to showcase Alyasha Moore’s art direction on his ’90s, politically-charged companies, a breath of conscious air in that empty vacuum that skateboarding can sometimes be. Anyway. Here’s what “The Black Jesus” had to say about his five faves.

*****

Television face (1993)
Art by Jahmal williams

Mike Vallely and Ed Templeton came to Boston on a tour and I met with them at the demo. I had already met Mike V. before, however, it was my first time meeting Ed and the rest of the team. I skated with them and begged my mom to let me go on tour with them.

We went on tour for a few weeks in Atlanta, Chicago and all these places on the East Coast. And then at the end of some demo, they told me they wanted to turn me pro! I was really excited cause I was in high school and that was the first tour that I ever went on. Eventually, they flew me to California and I stayed at Ed and Deanna’s house.  Ed was always painting and told me I should paint my own board graphics. He basically put some paint and brushes in my hand and said, “paint”.

I was really scared, I was drawing already but I was scared because it was my first board graphics. There were two of them; one slick bottom and one wood bottom. For the wood bottom,  I knew I just wanted the letter “j” because I had always thought it’d be a great graphic for Jovantae Turner and I was a big fan of his. Then I thought, “my name starts with a J also,” so I decided to use it.

The face board was produced during the same time. I just painted half of my face. It came out naturally and intuitively; it was just an idea that came up. I painted it on a piece of cardboard with acrylic paint. It was a selfportrait I guess because I had dreads at the time and I had bleached them blond.

American Dream Inc. Black Jesus (1995)
Art by Alyasha Moore

That was the first board I had on American Dream, it was a collaboration,  sort of. Alyasaha conceptualized everything; he was so good. At the time Wu Tang’s music was very popular. He was very into Wu Tang and we’d listen to it all the time so he gave everybody nicknames. Mike Hernandez was The Hitman Herns, Spencer Fujimoto was Shogun Assassin, Jimmy Chung was The Mantis and I was Black Jesus.  You’d have to ask him why. At the time I think I was into religion, however, my faith has changed over the years.

The psalms, they were sections that talk about some of the physical attributes of Jesus Christ, and when you read it, it describe him as having wooly hair and dark color skin. To me it sounded like he was darker than the image I had had in my mind of him growing up as a child, of a blue-eyed, blond-haired fella.  And I thought it would be cool just for my own consciousness to make Jesus Christ in my own image because people have been doing that throughout history. Aly is a very conscious person. Also,  this board is special to me because it was the first time someone had used that gloss black on flat black way to printing graphics.

AD Unit Marcus Garvey (1996)
Art by Alyasha Moore

This one came out a year after the Black Jesus board, I think?  Aly was always calling us and asking if we were into his ideas. He always wanted to know how we felt about graphics, and I have to say… I was into each one of them.

I had always seen portraits of Marcus Garvey painted in the black neighborhoods but I never knew what he was about. This graphic was so meaningful to me because it made me have to go and read up about him because people would ask me questions and I wouldn’t know what to tell them. He was born in Jamaica and came to the US and was a black nationalist, he believed in repatriation of the black people to Africa through the UNIA. How can I get into it? At the time there weren’t that many Black-Americans into skateboarding, and I thought it’d be cool to have a graphic with Marcus Garvey on it. It would be for Black-Americans first, and for the few other people that were into it- the graphic would be for them too.

People were very excited about American Dream because it was very different; the images and the content were ‘progressive’.

AD Unit MLK (1996)
Art by Alyasha Moore

Having Martin Luther King was cool because as kids we were always told about MLK, the Civil Rights movement and the idea of non-violent protesting.  The Marcus Garvey graphic was a bit more radical because he was before Martin Luther King and his ideas were more powerful in a sense. Being that radical back then was pretty ballsy. People were still getting lynched in those days.

This board is special to me because during that time I started to get more into learning about Black History and trying to learn more about myself. This sums up a stage in my life that was important. I like how all these boards on American Dream were not necessarily about Black Power in the, “we gonna take over the world” sense, but more about the Black Struggle and Black Empowerment. “Consciousness.”

Wu Tang Hard Goods Race Car (1998)
Art by Jahmal Williams & Aaron Hoover

That one was unique because that was the second board that came out on Wu Tang Hard Goods Company.  This was one that I collaborated with Aaron Hoover on. At the time I didn’t know anything about Photoshop or Illustrator, so I did the art direction for the whole series for Kevin Taylor, Maurice Key and myself.

Wu Tang Hard Goods came about when Christian Strike gave me a call. I had just finished an interview for Strength magazine when he said that Wu Tang was in touch with him and they wanted to do a skateboard company, and he was in charge of the company. He asked me some of my ideas about it and we put a team together. We wanted to make it the first all-black skate team.

The team consisted of  Maurice Key and myself, then Kevin Taylor came on board.  The next individuals in line were gonna be Mike Hernadez and Stevie Williams.  The company lasted close to a year or more and then it was stopped.  At the time we weren’t making very much money at all from our regular board sponsors.  But we made good royalties from the Wu-Tang Hard Goods sales. There were talks about us meeting the Wu Tang members and possibly going on tour with them, doing skate demos. But it got shut down before it got to that level,  someone else bought the licensing agreement. And that was that.

Mike Vallely: “If I did that graphic today it’d be an eagle flying over the city”

“There’s a lot of things you’d like to sweep under the rug,” Mike Vallely laughs, regarding certain of his past career moves. “I said yes to a lot of crazy stuff but I said no to a lot more that people don’t know about.” Kind of cool in a skateboarding world that brags way more about individuality than it actually generates. We need more Blenders, Gonzes, Kirks. And Vs too. When he skates, Mike can, and will, put on a show, following the icons that adorn the walls of his Long Beach garage turned altar: Kiss, Elvis, Evil Knievel. Not to mention a more orthodox skate-nerd treasure chest, i.e. well-organised drawers of original VCJ drawings and old World ads. This guy won’t struggle too hard to dig up five of his past boards, you think. And no, he didn’t.

Powell Peralta Elephant (1988)
Art by Vernon Courtland Johnson

“That particular color was never an actual production model, Powell Peralta made these sample boards to film for Public Domain. I skated this particular board during the two days of filming, then went to Louisville, KY for a contest, and handed it to a kid when I set up a new one. The kid happened to be [writer] Sean Mortimer. I didn’t remember any of that until he told me.

Fast forward to a couple years ago, Sean came to interview me for a book and he brought that deck with him. He told me the whole story but I couldn’t believe it. I went and got the old Thrasher with an ad for my first pro-model, the photo was taken while filming for the video. I matched up the deck, looked at the scrape marks on it, it was the board. They might have done five of them in yellow, but I never held on to boards and I brought the rest of the sample boards on a European tour right after that and as I skated them I gave them to kids along the way. Having Sean give me this board back after so many years meant as much to me now as it did to him when I gave it to him in ‘88.”

World Industries Barnyard (1990)
Art by Marc McKee

“Stacy Peralta and I just did not get along and I never felt like I fit the mold of the Bones Brigade skater, so I left Powell Peralta in early ‘89 to help form and ride for World Industries.  My original idea for the Barnyard graphic was a folk art pro-vegetarian kind of graphic. The way I envisioned it, it wouldn’t have been a cool graphic at all…

First time I saw this one I was pissed off cause I thought it poked fun at my original idea. But Rocco and Marc McKee were so excited about this graphic that I eventually warmed up to it. No one had done anything like this before and that was the one area I was able to find common ground with Rocco: he would take a chance at trying something new, I respected that.

Interesting footnote to this story, because this deck forever changed skateboard shapes, the Smithsonian Institute wants it in their collection as a piece of skateboard history. They only have one other board in there, a Stacy Peralta board. What’s funny is that I went with Stacy to the Smithsonian when we were filming for Public Domain, and he video taped me in there looking at his board on display.” ”

World Industries Snake (1990)
Art by Marc McKee

“To me, the burning city just sort of represented the establishment, the skateboard industry as a whole. And unfortunately the snake represented me. That’s just how I felt at the time. I didn’t feel good about skating, I didn’t feel good about myself, I felt like I was crawling. I didn’t feel like I had the kind of control or the say in my career that I wanted to have, World Industries was just Powell Peralta all over again.

I didn’t realize that no company could give me what I was looking for. I guess if I did that graphic today it’d be an eagle flying over a burning city. I’m definitely a different person now. I don’t rely on anyone or anything.”

Powell TCB (1997)
Art by Jim Knight

“Between 1994 and 1997, I was skating for Powell and also the team manager and promotions and marketing director for them. I suggested to do away with pro-models cause, I mean, we didn’t have the skaters to compete with the other companies. It was me and Steve Caballero, and at that point well we’d  been “washed up” since 1989!

In 1995 though, I won the first Tampa Pro, people start caring again, then we got Danny Wainwright, Charlie Wilkins, Stacy Lowery and Jayme Fortune on the team. I thought it would be good to bring back the pro-models, I felt like we’d turned the corner as a brand.

That’s when I got the idea for the lightning bolt. It came from my love of Elvis Presley.  The Elvis I really love is the Elvis of the ’70s, I can see the correlation with my skating when it comes to doing demos and performing. That’s when he decided to go on an endless tour all over the country. And he put on a show and he made a spectacle out of his musical performance.  His symbol became a lightning bolt, the TCB, Taking Care of Business. He was all about the show and all the people he surrounded himself with were expected to carry the same passion and work ethic than he had. To me the lightning bolt represents belief in self -self empowerment.”

Black Label Fist (1998)
Art by John Lucero

“Me going to Black Label was probably the rebirth for my skate career, where I was truly making a statement: skate how you want to skate. I had survived the ’90s and my skating was free to be whatever I wanted it to be and suddenly I had a very large audience who cared.

For this graphic Lucero combined the lightning bolt and the the other thing I’ve also been known for through the years, you know, this right hand. I guess that was a part of my character that Lucero liked — that I never took shit from anyone.

When I first started skating being a skater set me apart. Growing up in a small-minded town it lead to me getting my ass kicked on a regular basis. Early on I decided to fight back but I also realized along the way  that if you don’t follow anyone else, within skateboarding or in society, well, then that is a fight too. So the fist with the lightning bolt isn’t as much about actually punching people. It represents just fighting to maintain one’s own identity in a vacuum. This is one of my favorite graphics ever. Lucero gets it.”

Chromeball-style Christmas present, from Mike V’s vault:

Splendid ear torture

A product of the excellence of the French edcational system when it comes to teaching foreign languages, my terrible accent invites you to follow a video version of the latest Memory Screened page published in Skateboarder. Eric Dressen’s eardrum tortured, ladies and gentlemen!

John Lucero: “It was gonna get made, but last-minute Pushead fever hit”

Do you respect paper? If so, you’ll prefer to see what this page actually looked like in the mag.

John Lucero and board graphics go way baaack, before even he started Lucero Limited, that was going to become Black Label. Before even team-hoping through the ’80s between G&S, Variflex (twice), Zorlac, Santa Cruz, Madrid and Schmitt Stix, the eminent member of the La Mirada Rad Cats -the local crew complete with a logo arranged a la Dogtown cross- was already drawing logos on stickers in high school for his imaginary board companies such as Hot Sticks, sometimes handing them to pros at contests, only to see them displayed under their boards in magazines.
The real deal came later, when Lucero started skating for Madrid and got a job screen-printing decks at their warehouse. “They had this tiny factory,” he remembers, “the guys were like, we’re silk screening Suicidal Skates today. When I lifted that screen, it felt so cool. I actually stashed one away and kept it.” Besides, whose art got more tattoed on skaters’ skins in the past 25 years? And so on.
There could be a million other examples to illustrate a very simple point: street-skating pioneer John Lucero and memorable board graphics just go hand in hand. Here are only five from the boxes and boxes he had to pile up on the Black labels’ warehouse floor to do this thing.

Variflex Skull and Bat Wings board (1983)
Art by John Lucero

“This one is a prototype, it never came out. I hand drew and painted five of them, two which I kept, and three of them went to trade shows for Variflex to show. There weren’t a lot of skull graphics at the time yet, but I guess for this particular trade show Pushead had drawn some graphics for Zorlac, the John Gibson graphic, and it became all the rage.

When the Variflex dudes came back, they said, ‘Pushead graphics are what we need.’ I knew Pushead, so I called him and asked him if he wanted to do my board, but he couldn’t cause he was doing all the stuff for Zorlac. He gave me his buddy XNO’s number though, which led to my actual first pro-model, the Bondage Chick board.

It’s funny to think that if they hadn’t seen the Pushead stuff at this tradeshow they probably would have gone with this one. It was gonna get made, but last-minute Pushead fever hit. I really thought after that that my graphics weren’t good enough to be on skateboards.”

Variflex Bondage Chick board (1984)
Art by XNO

“When Pushead told me he couldn’t do my board, he was like ‘You know what though? I have a friend in Tennesse named XNO, he can draw some of the craziest graphics for you.’ He gave me his number, Chet Darmstadtler is his name, and he sent me a bunch of comic books and zines that he was doing. When I got them I was blown away.

I sent him a template of the board with where the holes for the trucks are, he drew all this kinda punk bondage, really weird dark stuff, always guys chained down. I said, ‘Hey man, I like what you do, how about a bondage chick on top of this guy?’ He just came up with it and it looked awesome.

Variflex went for it, they made about 200 of the first round and sent them out. A lot of the stores sent them right back. They said it was the most disgusting graphic they’ve ever seen, please take it back. That was that, probably only 400 of them were done.”

Madrid Jester board (1984)
Art by John Lucero

“At the Huntington beach contest that year, I got third place and ran into Jerry Madrid, he knew us cause he grew up pretty much in the same town I grew up in. He was down to make me the board that Santa Cruz, where I went after Variflex, never would. This one is the first production board that I got to draw my own graphics for.

At the time, I was influenced mainly by punk music, and always liked just demonic kinda joker guys. The only thing that didn’t come out the way I wanted on it is that I wanted a fluorescent pink board. And Jerry couldn’t quite get it to work. He came up with the bright green board, which worked, then we got a few runs of this lavender purple color.

I wanted fluorescent real bad cause it was the ’80s and I’d shop in Hollywood and buy fluoresecnt socks. All the stuff that was coming out of England, they had this stores called Posers and Let It Rock. It was awful shit too, man, but it was something different. Check me out, I’m glowing, you know what I mean?”

Schmitt Stix OG Bars board (1985)
Art by John Lucero

“After a while, there was no real reason to leave Madrid, but I just wanted to skate for Schmitt Stix. I got the opportunity and even got a job at the Vision art department, where I did my own graphics plus other skaters’, like the Baby Doll Blocks board for Jeff Grosso, or the Mad Scientist board for Kevin Staab, plus a lot of the Vision Blur ads.

Anyway, when time came to do my board on Schmitt Stix, I didn’t look much further than a sticker I had on that little drawer thing I had my TV on. When I was a kid I got it from a box of Trix breakfast cereals, it had this little guy behind bars and it said “dungeon”. I thought that that could look hot on a board. So I redrew it, it’s basically the same thing, and instead of “dungeon” I wrote my name.

People have made up all sort of interpretations of it but most of my graphics I do cause it looks cool, or fun, or funny and that’s it. Later on, I did a second version of this one, with the Joker coming out of the same bars. This one was a jab at Jerry Madrid cause the year after I left him, he redid my Joker board, but with “X Team rider” written instead of my name!”

Lucero Ltd Thumbhead board (1990)
Art by John Lucero

“I was at my friend’s John Grigley, and he had a postcard from this movie Children Of the Damned, there’s all these little kids with no eyes in it, right? And there’s four kids in this postcard, and this guy was in the back kinda, so he was on the top of the postcard and his head was cut off.

We just thought he was funny so we Xeroxed him a couple of times, it got kind of more blown-out like that, and then we just started drawing a bunch of different heads on him. Grigley drew a big, square head, I drew this one, the thumbhead ! Actually, he was on another board. Before he got his own board he was on the nose of a board with racing stripes I put out.”

Snail mail reactivity in Twitter times

The distribution might have moved West, way out West, Cliché’s dreams haven’t dwindled –thanks, Thesaurus. On the semi-old news front, but I’ll allow myself the luxury of having a snail-mail reactivity in these twitter times, you already know that Cliché does have a Sean Cliver board out that was properly silk-screened, and it looks awesome, and I won’t even go through the headache of explaining the classic aesthetical dichotomy (silk-screened/heat transfer, organic/supermarket, analogic/numeric): if you ended up here, you understand.

This in mind, this post is here for a few reasons:

1. To show that I’m still alive, thanks for all the get-better-soon letters.

2. Why pass the opportunity to display an original Cliver draft when you get the chance?

3. Did you know that the Cliché book Résumé is finally about to be out? I sort of said so already last year in Skateboarder, but this time it has an official release date : December 09. Check the outtakes already.

4. To display my dense network of informants, the two of them, within the industry. Gossip has it that Cliver might be working on a second board, and that McKee will be doing one as well, the body of work being described by an insider’s source as  ”fucked up, controversial shit for sure.” Sounds good to me!

Kris Markovich: “All the Zorlac guys would give you shit for skating street”

(Before we get into yet another slice of World/Cliver/Mc Kee nostalgia, make sure you order the Mc Kee/Bobshirt shirt collab right here. Thank you very much)

“I did feel like an odd ball,” Kris Markovich laughs when he reminisces about the early 90s. Being the dude with the long hair and the rabid speed in these wonderfully slow, non-popped über-tech days must have felt strange indeed. “The thing is,” Kris justifies himself, “a pressure flip is just an inward heel flip where you scoop your tail. I had already learned inward heels, popping them, so why would I have to do them super low now? But as fast as it came in it went out, and everything I was doing was cool again.”
As the Damon Byrd School of Foot Knitting was slowly losing all its nerdish students, Kris was back in the game and hasn’t stopped pushing yet, 16 years later. Usually, that means enough boards to fill this page. But Kris’s case has a twist: the man has had pro-models on no less than eleven board companies since 1991. Plus, riding for 101 meant a new deck every three weeks at one point. “Another one of my other favorite boards was the one with smiling faces on it”, Kris continues. “We were sitting at Natas’ house and we told him, ‘Allright you got 10 minutes to do a graphic.’ That’s how shit was going down.”
Later on, Kris got “Hard Life” tattooed on his knuckles. Just a premonition for the day some dude with a broken-ass French accent was to come and ask him to pick five boards out of a stack estimated by some scientist to 2.36 times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

101 Instant Martians (1991)
Art by Marc Mc Kee

“The cool thing with these Loney Tunes boards is that all the Rocco companies had them out [before a cease and desist from Warner Bros]. Blind had some, World had some, 101 had some…

They had been talking about these graphics for a while, I remember picking this one dude specifically, they had a bunch to choose from. Dune had the big, fuzzy red guy, and then I wanna say Jordan Richter ended up with [Marvin the Martian] from the same cartoon, but he was a little bummed that mine was already taken. This one is also special to me because it was the first board where I really worked on the shape with Rodney Mullen, to the point where I was going to the wood shop and everythin

101 Dukes of Hazard (1992)
Art by “maybe Spike Jonze who shot the photo and/or Natas”

“I’m pretty sure this one was before the Metallica one time-wise, but it’s hard to say cause I think they did a first run on a wood board, then a second run way later with a slick bottom.

Anyway, the whole idea behind this one is that Sal Barbier rode for Plan B, and he had the board with the photo of a lowrider car with a cholo chick and the dudes squatting like gangsters. Natas and I were messing around with ideas and he had a friend who had a Dodge Super Bee, so we went down to this weird creek river bed up in Malibu and shot the photo.

It was cool ‘cause it came out right after Sal’s board, when it was actually still out. Sal was super cool about it. It wasn’t making fun of him at all, it was more our version of it.”

101 Metallica (1993)
Art by Marc Mc… err… Sean Cliver (sorry, Sean !)

“That one was pretty funny. There used to be two YMCAs in Pensacola, Florida that had skateparks, one was a street park and one had a vert ramp. All the Zorlac guys would go to that vert ramp and would always give you shit for skating street.

As I got a little older and turned pro for 101, I got into the idea of having a graphic that’d poke fun back at those dudes. At the time Scott Stanton had this clown graphic on Zorlac so I wanted to redo that. Natas [Kaupas, 101’s owner] was like, “yeah we’re probably gonna sell the whole two of them.” He was totally against it. Then McKee [who happened to be Cliver, in fact -Seb's note] started sketching the skull with the beanie on and the toothbrush through it, and he did the Markovich/Metallica lettering.

When it came out, Zorlac was already dying, so I never got a reaction from these guys. At the time Scott Stanton was pretty heavily into music, so he was out of pro skating pretty much. It would probably have been better if it had been one of my first boards, but nobody knew who I was and nobody would have got the joke.”

Foundation Dad tribute (2000)
Art by Dave Lively

“So in between the one before and this one there’s been quite a while and a bunch of companies: Prime, Color, Element. Of course there’s been some graphics I liked on Prime and Color, like the one with the Circle K or the one that Ron Cameron did, it was a face with buildings on top of its head. But not to the extent that they are super-special to me.

This one is, and it has nothing to do with the shape or anything. I just like it cause it’s a graphic I did for my dad after he passed away. This is based on a photo of him when he was 23, and he passed away when I was 23. As soon as I got on Foundation we got this graphics going.

The initials are his initials, Robert Boris Markovich. I don’t even know if it sold well, but it’s one of my favorites for obvious reasons.”

Given Day of the Dead (2009)
Art by Kris Markovich

“We started Given less than a year ago, and I’ve been doing a lot of Day of the dead art lately. This board came out really good. Even on Crimson I did a lot of the graphics but I never liked my artwork. This one though, I’m really happy with the way it came out, it’s the first time that has happeend in years.

I’ve always kind of like the Dia De Los Muertos, I had a few Day of The Dead graphics on Crimson. My thing with it is that it’s cool, cause you look at Day of the dead art, it’s always kinda sloppy. It’s never perfect, and that blends well with the kind of art I do. I never have a plan with I do when I start my art anyway. I’ve always drawn and had a say in graphics, but it wasn’t until I bought my house and I had actually a studio in it that I started being able to paint big.

Now it’s almost like a second job for me, I skate and then I do artwork on the side. Most of my art on Crimson, and now Given, were painting of pictures that I’d done. I rarely do art especially for board graphics purposes.”

Special thanks : Al Boglio & Marc McKee

Domaine de prestige # 1: Trauma skateboards

You know how it is with wine? How you gotta drive hours on dirt roads to track the best domaines? Would be good if the nowadays dudes adopted the same attitude when it comes to skate graphics, instead of just pointing at the wall at Active. So please, every now and then, take the dirt road to its end. There you might stumble upon a few gems, including one of my favorite “recent’ companies ever, Trauma out of Montpellier, France. Get familiar, while I’ll try to make this a regular feature… Don’t hold your breath though.

Chris Miller: “It’s interesting to represent a human with animal features, it says something more exaggerated”

From Skateboarder # 109

Just like George Costanza needs a protégé, sometimes in life all you need is a mentor. Chris Miller got one in his early days, teammate Neil Blender. “He was the one who encouraged me to do my own graphics,” Pipeline’s adoptive son, now 41, remembers. “I would never have thought of that. I mean, I liked drawing, but I would never have considered doing graphics.” Funny, especially when you come to think that since this very early-‘80s day, he’s never not drawn his own designs –besides once, see below. Modern day ledge ballerina mandatory warning: this page contains such incongruitous names as G&S, Schmitt Stix, and Planet Earth. Here are Chris’ favorite pro-models.

G&S Face board (1985)
Art by Chris Miller

“G&S made me a first board but I didn’t like the graphic, so I ended up doing this one. I had a friend shoot a photo of my face, printed it and enlarged it, then I just drew over the photo. The little guys falling through space and time got redone by one of their in-house artists, he kept changing the original sketch and making the face look all cartoony. He even gave me this one where it looked like some Batman or Joker thing, and I was like, ‘No, that’s not how it’s supposed to be…’ Anyway. The final result was cool.

I like how G&S did a lot of variations so all the graphics would come in different colors, there are unique colorways all over the place. That’s when Randy Janson was screen-printing for them, he went on and ran Gullwing for a while, then became a well-known tatto artist, he would do cool stuff like that.

On the bottom left corner, the “1″ with the clock kinda represents time, and the next symbol represents a cycle. The original idea was to have this on each board, changing the first number every time. But I ended up having it only on this board. I have no idea why.”

G&S Lizard board (1986)
Art by Chris Miller

“This is the second pro-model that I drew. The cool thing with this artwork is that it’s a linoleum cut, like a wood cut. This was all hand-carved and I made a print out of it.

I still have the actual block at my house, I gave this whole board collection to my son Lucas, he has the original ink block too. I was still in high school when I was doing this. As an artist I was just young and trying different things. It doesn’t have a specific meaning.”

Schmitt Stix dog board (1988)
Art by Chris Miller

“I get a lot of questions about the meaning of this character, but really, I was just inspired by the idea of this half-animal, half-human creature. I don’t even know where the Christmas tree on the nose idea came from… When I was younger I was into surrealism, and also I always liked Max Ernst, he had all these paintings from post-WW2 period of human figures with bird heads and animal heads, I probably drew from that.

I think it’s interesting to represent a human with animal features, it says something more exaggerated. I also like this board cause I’m pretty sure that it was the first one with a true upturn, kick nose. Paul Schmitt was responsible for that though. At first I wasn’t sure I was gonna like it, it looked so weird back then. But this board sold really, really well.”

Schmitt Stix Faces board (1989)
Art by Chris Miller

“There’s a lot of messages on there, based on thinking about humanity and what was going on in the world. So you have a George Washington face on there, representing money, and different characters from different cultures. For instance on the left, it’s a charcater from a book I read called Ishi: Last Of His Tribe, it’s the true story of a Native American whose whole tribe [The Yahi] had been killed off, he was surviving quietly in the forest and hiding, and eventually somebody found him. But noone in the world was talking his language. He was the last person in his whole culture. I would recommend anybody to read this book.

Then there’s this character asking why, it’s probably me. Finally at the bottom is this hand with the fish, I used it on other boards later. To me, it represents the mystery of creation and life. It came from the idea that if you have fish in a bowl, it won’t be aware of the hand or the arm connected to it, the fish is only aware of the fingertip that’s in the water. So you have this prospective of how we perceive things, but maybe we only see the fingertip. We only see what we can, or what we want to see.”

Planet Earth cat board (1990)
Art by Chris Miller

“The funny thing with the name Planet Earth ist that people thought it was purely environmental, but really it wasn’t, it was more thinking about our place on the earth. It almost goes back to the Schmitt Stix Faces board -even though it was kind of a take on the Ecology symbol from the ’70s. I am not sure about the E backwards, maybe it was saying that the world wasn’t a perfect place or something.

Anyway, this is probably my favorite graphic that I did. The ghost of the bird has come back to haunt this huge cat I use to have, Rascal, a really good hunter. I thought it was funny how cats spend their days killing all sort of animals, but do they ever regret it? Or do they just enjoy it and their instinct catches over? So in a weird way, on a more serious note, I was facinated with the idea of our consciousness or our own guilt over our actions, our own feelings of what’s right and wrong.”

Aaron Suski: “I couldn’t believe it, the idea had never been done”

(Photo by the ever-awesome Sean Cronan)

Writing this page is kind of like giving yourself absurd Top Chef-style challenges. Only it doesn’t involve cooking a delicious, raffiné dish with car tires and Dr Pepper (naked, with no pans or stove) while former Guantanamo guards taze you with pepper spray. All in four minutes.
So after the Salbas and the Mountains, this month’s Tom Collicchio-free challenge consisted of finding a recent pro that went through at least two or three different graphically interesting companies in the past decade. Easy? Not if we talk about modern-days, fluo-free companies, and even less if you try to find a pro that had an input on his graphics so he has something to say about them. It comes down to a handfull of dudes, really. Upstate-Newyorkan/Tucson transplant Aaron Suski is one of them. Maybe because he spent most of his career on one of the most graphically slept-on companies, 5boro? Or maybe cause his first board was “not that hot as far as graphics go,” as he says –it was a Jeff Grosso Enjoy- leading him to a long Natas-only stint? Whatever the reason, Suski picked his five faves out of his three board sponsors. Your time… starts… now!

5boro Collage board (2000)
Art by Aaron Suski & Dylan Haley

“That was my first pro-model ever, so I was pretty excited when this came out. Basically Dylan took my sketch book after I went on a 5Boro trip to England for a couple weeks, where I had done some art and cut off images from bags and random stuff in the streets. The horse and the little farmer behing him came from this little café that we went to every morning in Brixton. This one wasn’t even a finished sketchbook, he just browsed through it and picked some elements. The bird in the right corner I drew. Then he put the train and the statue of liberty, and it’s pretty rad cause I was taking a two-hours train to go back home in Ustate new York, so that was very symbolic of that. I used to always keep kind of journals like this but i’ve been slacking lately.”

5boro Faces board (2001)
Art by Doug Switalski

“The actual artwork for this board was hanging in the skate-shop that I ride for out here [in Tucson], my friend Doug did it and gave it to the shop. It was probably done on a 8×11’’, big piece of white paper, I think it was done with crayons.

Anyway, I thought that’d be a sick board, so Steve [Rodriguez, 5boro’s mastermind] went with it. This dude Doug was one of the first people I met when we moved out here. And we skated with him all the time, and to this day he’s one of the people who skates a lot. We actually just went skating today. He’s a very talented, Jack of many trades kind of dude. He hasn’t done many board graphics I think, but he’s always doing art or working on something.”

5boro De Los Muertos board (2003)
Art by Enrique Lazaro

“Enrique is a sick tattoo artist, so I kinda asked him how he’d feel about doing a board. He also lived in the South West for a while, and if you live down there you’re really exposed to Dia De Los Muertos, the day of the dead, cause we’re only one hour away from Mexico. It’s really festive down here, it’s awesome. But anyway, Enrique’s been influenced by that as well.

I basically just gave him the idea to make it the Dia De Los Muertos board, and just kinda told him what I wanted, maybe some skeletons with guitars or something. He painted this on a big piece of wood, on a big 3×4 plank. I shot a hi-res photo of it and sent it over. I never knew anything about this day on the East Coast, and i took a huge liking to it when I moved here, and I like what it represents to the people, it’s soulful. I guess I love this board cause it ties in with moving here for me.”

5boro Shaman board (2003)
Art by Rich Arbitelle

“My friend that I grew up skating with in Upstate New York did this graphic, I mean he lives in Jersey, but whatever. He put a lot of work into it, it’s not something you put one hour, or even one day in it, it’s super intricate work. He also did a lot of the graphics for Brooklyn boards, when that was around.

Originally this one was gonna be a totem pole, but he came up with this and I loved it, man. He just nailed it. Rad little animals on it. The funny thing, I am not especially into shamanism per se, but I have a high respect for the whole Native American philosophy. It’s intriguing to me.”

Zoo York Native New Yorker board (2006)
Art by Will Carpio & Mark Nardelli

“All the East Coast dudes leaving Birdhouse at the same time, that was a trip, man. But a window of opportunity opened this way, so… It just felt right to skate for an East Coast company again and this was my welcome board on Zoo. I was so impressed. Dude, I couldn’t believe it, that idea had never been done. The bridge bricks for the headdress and the buildings for the feathers, the black on grey with the arrowheads on the background…

It wasn’t even a series or a regular board, it was just kind of a debut board, that’s only because I just got on. It was a whole theme like I’m migrating back to the East, a Native New Yorker coming back home kind of thing. I still go back to New York once every two months for two weeks in Spring and Summer. It was just rad to be back where I started.”