You described yourself initially as a skater first and an artist
second. How did skating serve as a conduit into art for you?
Don Pendleton: I’d been exposed to classical paintings and
that kind of thing, but skating was definitely the way I got into
modern art. I was drawn to the graphics, the icons, and the
logos—the stuff associated with the early skateboard companies.
You were skating at the time. Did you feel like those images
served as graphic representations of the culture itself?
I grew up in a really small town in West Virginia, so when I
was exposed to skateboarding, it was automatically associated
with Southern California and bigger cities. What skateboarding
represented to me was an escape from being in a small town and
this connection to something bigger.
Was music a part of that as well?
Definitely. The first issue of Thrasher I ever got was probably
in 1985. The way that magazine approached skateboarding
was [as] a culture. They had punk rock articles, advertisements
from bands like JFA, Big Boys, Black Flag—all the old SST stuff.
It kind of all came together. Sometimes you’d see a logo for
something, and me—being in the middle of nowhere—I didn’t
know if it was a band or skateboard company or what. The lines
were blurred by the way it was presented.
How did you start making art yourself?
I think it started out with just drawing on my notebook at
school, trying to connect to all that stuff [I read about in
Thrasher]. The first modern skateboard I ever had was a Vision
Old Ghost Guardian, so I would draw that skull all over the
place. We would make ramps and spray–paint G&S logos
on them. Neil Blender was one of my favorite skaters at the
time—and still is—and he did all his graphics himself. There
was this connection between skateboarder and artist. It was all
the same thing at the time.
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