Get a Skateboard

2024
8 × 11 in.
Acrylic

Get a Skateboard is my completely unreasonable response to the people who annoy me at skateparks.

The painting shows three people hanging from ropes. One is a longboarder, one is a scooter rider, and one is a rollerblader. Together they represent the types of people I constantly find myself getting irritated with at the skatepark because somehow they always seem to be exactly where I am trying to skate.

Obviously I do not actually want anything to happen to them. This is exaggerated cartoon violence. Instead of being annoyed and keeping it in my head, I turned that frustration into something so ridiculously extreme that it becomes funny.

There is also something I love about putting the three of them together like a little family. They are united by one thing. None of them brought a skateboard.

Skateboarding is something I genuinely love, so I can also be completely irrational about it. In my head, the skatepark belongs to skateboarders. Is that fair? Probably not. Do I still get annoyed when a scooter flies directly into the line I was about to take? Absolutely.

That is where paintings like this come from. I can take a tiny everyday annoyance, exaggerate it beyond reason, and turn it into a world where my stupid internal reaction actually happens.

Longboard. Scooter. Rollerblades. My solution is apparently the same for everyone. Get a skateboard.