When it’s said that an artwork is done in “paint on board,” it usually refers to a created image on a flat piece of wood. But Sunshine Coast illustrator and muralist Ben Tour has given the term a new twist – spray-paint on skateboards.
In his new show, Child’s Play, at The Kube in Gibsons, Tour uses ten skateboard “decks” – the wooden portion without the wheel hardware – as a platform for strikingly rendered paint-and-ink depictions of his signature subjects.
“All the icons of my work are here. I tried to cover all my bases,” Tour said in an interview at the show’s April 6 opening reception. “The wolf, the hawk, youthful women, pained humans.”
Tour, originally from Toronto, has been a Coast resident for ten years and is most recently known for the giant gliding-eagle mural on an outer wall at Capilano University in Sechelt, which he completed last fall. He’s also the creator of other locally commissioned street art, like the Beachcomber Coffee mural in Gibsons and an animal-themed work on a basketball court wall at Cedar Grove Elementary School in Elphinstone.
Tour’s links to skateboarding are nothing new. In the early 2000s, he worked for eight years as the in-house illustrator for the now-defunct Vancouver skateboarding magazine Color. He said he also still does a few skateboard illustrations every year for Kitsch, a board manufacturing company. Though never a hardcore skater himself, Tour has been immersed into the culture once again, thanks to his ten-year-old skateboarding son.
“That’s what reinvigorated this show and inspired it,” Tour said. “I was going to the skate park every day, taking him skating, buying boards and skate shoes, talking skateboarding, looking at videos. That got me back into it.”
Tour got the boards he used for this latest series from an artisan board-maker in Nelson.
“It’s just fun to paint on skateboards. It’s a fun canvas to be limited to,” he said.
Tour said he’d rather that buyers of his boards enjoy them as art, not transportation, but admits it’s not his call.
“They are made by a guy who makes boards to be ridden. So, it’s a legit skateboard,” he said. “I spent hours and hours painting them, so I’d prefer if you didn’t. But if you want to spend 650 bucks on a board that’s been hand-painted and skate on it at the park, then go ahead.”
Child’s Play runs until April 30.
