Pictographs and Paint Cans
Nowadays it’s mostly my own madness, but we used to have art shows at DoubleShot. Way back when we were just single-wide, I mounted steel rails high up on the walls that held rods where we hung rotating pieces from local artists. My friend Candice was in charge of contacting artists and scheduling each show. During this time, I learned that many artists spend a lot of time on their works and become very attached, to the point that they put price tags on paintings that almost guarantee they won’t have to part with them.
I’m not like that. If you even considered me to be some sort of artist, I’d say I’m a production artist, at best. I design things that I want people to take home. I create pieces that are temporary and curious. My work isn’t supposed to be perfect, just interesting. I took a page out of Shepard Fairey’s book (of which I have a few) when it comes to posters. I started noticing his OBEY signs around Nashville when I was visiting friends there in 2003. I read Shepard’s manifesto. And I brought that ethos into the DoubleShot when I started creating my own works. It’s about asking questions. It’s about piquing curiosity. We want our customers to ask questions so that we can share what we know and what we do. So if you ever see something in the DoubleShot and ask yourself, “I wonder what that’s supposed to mean?” I did my job. Now go ask a barista.
Art is subjective. Even the definition of art is subjective. Mark showed me that some guy duct taped a banana to the wall and a collector bought it for some ungodly price. Methinks Scotch tape and a coffee bean could be next. But I remember once when a show went up on those 18th & Boston walls, I puzzled at the art and told Candice, “I could’ve done that.” To which she replied, “But you didn’t.” And that’s the rift. Some art is fantastical. Some art is simple. And just because you feel it’s beneath you doesn’t mean it isn’t art.
People just like us (only way tougher and more capable) scratched stick figures of people and longhorn sheep, bears, boats, snakes, and all sorts of things into rock walls thousands of years ago. Sometimes they used ochre and other times they tapped the rock in paleo pointillism like Seurat’s ancient ancestors. Today we put ropes and stanchions around these images to protect them from being defaced by bored teenagers, and park rangers lead interpretive talks about the people who lived and made art and died in these places.
To some, the geology of the walls is interesting enough, but to most of us it’s the art on those walls that draws our attention. Were the paleoindians defacing the cliff walls by making petroglyphs and pictographs up and down the desert corridors? Some primitive form of graffiti? Perhaps they were, but now we protect it as if it’s a Banksy stencil on a London flat.
If you look at the definition of graffiti on the internet, it’s defined as a form of vandalism, which is “willful or malicious destruction or defacement of public or private property.” But graffiti artists aren’t painting in order to cause harm to someone, and in my opinion they aren’t “spoiling the appearance” of austere, grey concrete walls or decrepit, decomposing factory facades. A lot of these guys are really talented and invest a significant amount of time and money for specialized spray paint to decorate the undersides of our infrastructure. You may not like it because you can’t read it, and when you can, you don’t like what it says. You’re confused by Rebop, Mango, Swank Tabu and the like. And you don’t like being confused. Because, just like Shepard Fairey’s OBEY posters, you might have to actually think and consider the fact that mega-corporations are bombarding you with words and symbols every day in public spaces trying to entice gratuitous consumerism. Words like Nike and Pepsi and those ubiquitous golden arches are so prevalent that you barely even think about it any more; they’ve bored deep into your subconscious.
I’ve never been a big fan of paid advertising. It seems like a promotion lacking creativity when there are so many ways of getting your message out for free. Way back in the early 2000s, I’d put DoubleShot stickers in places they might not necessarily belong. And then a customer named Jonathan showed me how to cut stencils into corrugated cardboard with an X-ACTO knife. So I started spray painting the sides of empty Solo cup cartons with the word COFFEE and some with a primitive-looking DoubleShot logo, and zip tying them to telephone poles up and down Riverside Drive. People would see a sticker at, say, Turkey Mountain and then follow my kraft blazes down the river to our front door for coffee. Once, a city worker came to DoubleShot with a big stack of my cardboard signs and told me it was against the law to put them on city poles. I was thankful that he returned them, comped him a cup of coffee, and promptly went back out to zip tie them on poles that our governors have no authority over. Then I discovered the stencil burner and mylar plastic sheeting.
If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll remember that most of the DoubleShot tshirts, hoodies, and trucker hats from the early years were painted by my dad and me with stencils I cut in plastic. We had a lot of fun airbrushing multi-layered stencils, and the designs were only limited by our imaginations.
My dad and I started restoring vintage cruisers and I created a new company called Native Bikes. We would disassemble each one and fix whatever might be wrong, sandblast the frame, and I would dream up a theme and paint scheme, oftentimes using stencils for flames, names, and patterns. The logo I’d created for Native was cut into an aluminum head badge, which branded the front of every one of our bikes, including my own racing bike.
I took that Native moniker with me on many mountain bike journeys. We painted my bike frame a metallic grey and baby blue with flames on the top and down tubes, and I named it nemesis. That bike and I felt like the nemesis of many cyclists, and our go-anywhere approach made us the antagonist to customs, regulations, and laws across the American West. The name stuck, and when I took to the streets with stencils in hand, it felt only natural to bring it with me. But I’m a minor figure (even a non-entity) when it comes to art.
I did attend a liberal arts college, where I was required to take an art participation and an art appreciation course. So I chose hand built clay (which found me crafting slab bowls and animated statues) and “Classical Gods and Heroes” (which introduced me to The Odyssey and all manner of other Greek mythological characters). In most forms of art, I’m better at appreciation than I am at participation. So I admire the 3,000 year old rock art in the Colorado river valley outside Moab. I appreciate the genius of renaissance painters whose work dangles on museum walls. I gawk at massive, corpulent black statues in Botero Plaza in Medellin. And I marvel enviously at the skill of people with aerosol paint cans who create whimsical, colorful, intricate designs in the nooks and crannies of public spaces, most of which you wouldn’t dare to go.
Like the Hindu rangoli designs on the doorsteps of homes I visited in India, street art is temporary. Government employees and citizen vigilantes are constantly blocking those colorful concrete paintings in drab grey and brown overcoats. I admire the art until it disappears, and then I wait for creatives to redecorate on some moonlit night. Like discreet billboards, our street artists are painting their tags in places you might have to look for. Oftentimes they won’t block out your view of the countryside, but peek out from the buttress of an overpass. That’s the way I like it. Art only found by the curious and observant.
And since I love free advertising, I’ve taken this opportunity to borrow my favorite Tulsa tag for a new line of products. Fittingly, this comes from my other company, Native Design, through an off-color project I call nemesis.
Over the years, I’ve ripped off some of the best. Shephard Fairey, Banksy, the paleoindians, Maurizio Cattelan, Johannes Vermeer, Bob Bernstein, Rube Goldberg, Magritte, Gainsborough, Vettriano, Picasso… Boost.
I am the nemesis, after all.