Tomorrow my friend Don Pendleton will be launching an online exhibit from his bunker in Dayton, Ohio. It’s not that often that Don makes his paintings available and when he does people tend to scoop em up quick. Check Don’s Elephont.com tomorrow to check it all out and in the meantime have a read below for a little insight…

First off, what’s the deal with the exhibit? The basic rundown, I guess.
Basically, I was just stoked to have time to do some art for myself. I’ve been under fairly constant direction for the past year or so and was completely burned out on making things specifically to have them sell. There’s a side of me that can appreciate that to a degree but for the most part, it always feels unnatural and I generally cringe at the end result because it’s nothing like it started out as when it’s finished. If it’s going to end up with a price tag and be in a retail setting at the end of the day, it’s probably going to go from something that may have started out with some potential and ends up being just another image that fits into the giant puzzle of the skate shop board wall.
It’s like camouflage! Go stare at a board wall sometime…it can be like taking a handful of Ambien.
I just wanted to do something fun again…get away from the bottom line for a bit.

Is there a common theme to these paintings?
I started out with a theme that I wanted to explore but by the second painting, I realized I was doing the same thing I was in the habit of doing…forcing artwork into some cubicle. After that, I kind of just got hung up on breaking up space with color and shapes…and it became kind of an obsession just to take a surface and dissect it into parts and color. Getting back to the basics of design almost more than focusing on illustration. I’ve always said I’m not a painter…that I just draw using paint and these pieces may make that point even further. So a lot of them look similar to one another except when they look completely different. It was almost like a doodling process where you don’t think about what you’re doing too much.
One thing I was conscious of was that I was coming off of the gloom and doom of this pseudo-edgy dark shit that plagued everything for several years. But my stuff has generally had a darker slant to it so I worked as far outside of that as I felt comfortable, really. It’s not to say that I’ve changed; I still think the world is a fucked-up place going in the wrong direction most of the time….and I resent the idea that the dumber people are, the happier they seem to be for the most part. I guess ‘The Edge of Bright’ is about trying to find the bright side…even if none exists. The futility of forcing yourself to look for something that you realize doesn’t exist in many cases. That’s what these paintings ended up being about more than anything.

What’s up with Element?
I was working for them under contract for a while and we had a pretty good relationship. Jeff Dickson left to go work at Blackbox and Matt Irving left to do his own thing and it just wasn’t the same after that. It felt like there were less people in my corner from a creative standpoint and the freedom just didn’t seem to be there as time went on.
I understand the commerce of skateboarding. I understand target markets and study groups and all of that. Where it’s place is in skateboarding, I’m still not sure. I have a lot of respect for Johnny and the work he’s put into building the company. And there are some really cool people over there manning various parts of the ship.

I guess at the end of the day, the last thing you want in the machine is a guy who’s out in Ohio that’s bickering and battling to have graphics look a certain way, which may not fit into the rest of what the collective industry is doing.
But those guys gave my artwork a lot of support over the years…especially Phil and the crew at the European offices.

I’m not working with Element at all at this point, which was a relief in many ways and a disappointment in others because I know the potential was there to do something really cool with the company but I don’t think they knew how to deal with me not being in the building. But I get it… when the stakes are high, there’s a ton of money involved and there’s a formula that has worked, it’s probably really scary for the money guys to try different directions or something new.

So for the first time in a decade, I’m not doing skateboard graphics for a living. And believe it or not, it’s a lot less traumatic than I thought it would be.
I needed a break.

When we were talking recently you mentioned “liking” painting more than you had in a long time. Why is that? What was different about this series?
Just not thinking about it as much…not thinking about the bottom line. Everything tends to flow and evolve when you take those restraints away and it’s the first time I really only focused on painting for a period of time. Generally, I would paint in between jobs, work all day, then start painting at night…which produces mixed results.
So I just put myself into them without much concern of what they would amount to in the end and played around like I used to. Kind of like when I was working for AWS and the images just came out of playing around and having fun…that’s probably the best way I can describe it.

In the time between the release of my Little Giants film I did on you and now, could you sum up what you’ve been up to in a couple of sentences?
Just trying to balance life and work and trying to stay productive. That’s enough to keep anyone busy.