A common thread through my sled designs is the absence of planning, premeditation, construction lines or eraser crumbs. Always ruthlessly restless in my craft, in carving out an escape from tightly-laced high realism portraiture painting that I labelled as my niche, the first time I moved to Byron Bay (Australia) I chose a steezy mini twin-fin as something new to drip paint onto as a party trick. (This came of course after building a functional half pipe skate-ramp the size of an entire art gallery to invite fine-art viewers to test out my hand-made skateboard decks, to wreck them, wear them, and tear them, so as to challenge the traditional narrative of how we view art.)
I poured my restlessness into this far-from-pre'packaged medium and this new tattoo-like linework style ensued for the first time; From the very first Byron-bled log I took a POSCA Paint weapon to in a mate's backyard, I established this rule for myself when mark-making on a board: I would not allow myself to pre-plan any single line or design in its composition; no rough sketches, no guidelines, no reference material allowed when my pen's licking a board. Just wing it. More often than not, it has been in this space, in-between the trapeze bars, where the visual "free-writing" - for lack of a better model of the practice - takes on a life of its own.
It often just starts with one mark, one mindless motif that flows into an endless totem, and I'm addicted.
With the nature of a board's resin skin, an eraser would not even work to hit "backspace." No "undo" button, the unforgiving ground of the glassed canvas drinking up my gliding paint marker, I'm forced to be honest with every mark made, and have it take me somewhere without reprieve. So what you see below are products of my using the space of a sled as my canvas, as a place to switch off, to play with my demons, to release the headnoise and to just ride it out. Somebody once told me, Better to make a mark and to completely shred, shake, scrape, spew and "destroy" the piece, than to refrain from making any mark at all on a clean canvas, paralysed by the fear.
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