The skateboard deck gets much love with LVSK8 5
by Danielle Kelly
Photo: Leila Navidi
Las Vegas Weekly
In 2006, local artist Michael Todoran had an idea: What if someone gave Las Vegas artists a skateboard deck and free reign to do whatever the hell they wanted with it? The result was the inaugural LVSK8 show, an exhibition in which skateboard love united high-brow, low-brow and everything in between.
Skateboarder or no, it’s hard to not be impressed with the level of artwork on display at LVSK8 5 at Empire Gallery. Photo: Leila Navidi
Five years later Todoran has moved to Ohio, and tattoo artist and gallery owner Justin McCroy has taken over. McCroy, who participated in the first SK8 show and sponsored the second, brings LVSK8 5 to his Empire Gallery inside Emergency Arts.
Empire is notable for its meticulously installed shows that slyly celebrate classical drawing and painting skills under the umbrella of tattoo culture. McCroy has spent the past year giving tattoo artists a space to show the full extent of their artistic arsenal, presenting illustrative work concerned primarily with craftsmanship.
It’s no surprise, then, that LVSK8 5 has some pretty terrific boards by tattoo artists. A beautiful example are the decks painted by Stay True Tattoo’s Kent Kelley, Clark North, Kyle Montoya and Jason Murphy, each of whom painted an animal representing one of the four seasons. This exuberant bestiary of real and imagined creatures is finely rendered in the design tradition of Japanese woodcuts.
Non-tattoo artist Jesse Squints embraces a different low-brow vibe with “Untitled.” A deftly hand-stenciled monkey distracts from a surveillance camera attached to the deck, scrawled with the slogan “quick steal that one.” It’s political and street smart, with a Banksy influence providing part of its charm.
Snatching words from classic punk tunes and perverting universal one-liners, JW Caldwell conquers the difficult task of incorporating text into painting. His shark infested “Business Plan” is old-world typography meets Ed Ruscha meets Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.
Tattoo artist Anthony Ortega’s “Untitled” disarms with a deck that doubles as a plinth carrying the flora and fauna of an insect-like creature straight out of a Ray Harryhausen film.
And the talent isn’t limited to the tattoo crowd. Roslyn Anderson condenses the expressive, decorative line work of her compatriots into a mass of squiggles that takes the shape of two hands breathtakingly on the brink of touch, a la Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam.”
Jessica Starkey’s hilarious mixtape of tiny Michael Jacksons careening through “A Michael Medley” somehow makes complete sense across from Vivien Chua’s oddly gorgeous portrait of a rooster in the succinctly titled “Cock Block.”
LVSK8 5 continues the grand “group hug” tradition of allowing diverse creative concerns to slam headlong into the great unifier that is the skateboard deck. Street art, fine art, conceptual art—all are welcome here.
Decked Out: The Fine-Art Transformation of Skateboards
by Jennifer Henry
Photography by Shane O’Neal
944 Magazine December 2006
“I swore I’d never do another group show again!” laughs Michael Todoran on the eve of his second “kinda confusing because usually these things are annual” Las Vegas Hand Painted Skate Board Show. LVSK8 One, Todoran’s first curation of skateboard decks by 56 local artists and shown in UNLV’s Grant Hall in April 2006 was a marked success. It inspired LVSK8 Deuce, which debuts during December’s First Friday festival at artist Mark T. Zeilman’s MTZ Gallery.
Photo: Shane O'Neal
Originally conceived as a collection of 15 pieces by Todoran and his close friends, excitement about LVSK8 One prompted eager artists to approach the organizer for an opportunity to work on a board. “I was getting phone calls from people I’d never met who heard about what I was doing and wanted to be part of it,” he says. “I’d buy 10 more boards and then more people would approach me. That’s how the show grew, gradually, 10 boards at a time.”
With last minute submissions pouring in during the Grant Hall opening and more than 20 no-shows, Todoran cursed the chaos and vowed never to organize another group show, a declaration the artist first made while compiling a 2003 print exchange at UNLV. But both shows paid off, garnering accolades and record attendance. “There was a crowd of people waiting for Grant Hall to open,” Todoran reminisces about LVSK8 One’s reception. “I don’t ever remember a show getting that kind of response.”
This time around Todoran planned for the pandemonium, asking artists from the first collection to take on another board and feeling out a fresh crop of contributors that he is confident will come through. “We’re at about 100 artists, but you never know how many will show up,” says Todoran. Among the most reliable are his fellow UNLV alumni, in-progress BFAs and MFAs. LVSK8 One included boards from post-thesis MFA Chad Brown, ’07 MFA Danielle Kelly and Associate Department Chair Helga Watkins.
But fine art isn’t the focus of Todoran’s skateboard shows. Nor are they about the tattoo subculture, though many of the participants are prominent tattoo artists such as LVSK8 Deuce’s co-sponsor and Bad Apple Tattoo Company owner Boom. It isn’t about skate art either. “You can’t paint on skateboards without introducing that culture into it,” says Todoran. LVSK8 One and Deuce have been a vehicle for Todoran and invited artists to “break the fine art rules.”
Repeatedly characterizing LVSK8 as a “refreshing experience,” Todoran says the excitement level surrounding the events mirrors the enthusiasm he feels from the participating artists. “It’s a low pressure environment; no juries, no criticism, just the artists and their work.” Friendly competition is yielding ever more inventive submissions and though Todoran is reluctant to preview pieces before the show, he promises LVSK8 Deuce will be even better than the first. And there might just be a third collection on the horizon. “Maybe,” smiles Todoran. “Let’s see how I feel after this one.”
What’s Your Type?
by Jory Farr
Columbus Monthly June 2010
The first thing I notice when lingering over Michael Trajan Todoran’s eponymously named typeface-Todoran- is that it appears to be alive. The letters are like mini creatures, hand-drawn to create an immediate response.
Take the “B.” There’s an element of Old English and hand movement that you would get in graffiti art. The” &” looks like something out of Celtic mythology or even cuneiform, the remote ancestor of all writing. Or consider the crucial”L.” The joints of the letter come together like bones and suggest some ancient artifact-some deep, long ago connection reestablished.
“‘L’ was the character that helped me extrapolate this whole typography,” Todoran says. “I looked at the way wind moved and I looked at the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical algorithm found in nature over and over again. It’s also called the golden number or the golden mean. It shows proportions. And though I didn’t exclusively follow it, I referenced it when designing Todoran.”
Typefaces reflect their time. Helvetica, a creature of modernism, is nearly ubiquitous because it answered a need in worldwide communication for a bold script that could broadcast messages at any size or in any format. But typefaces also unlock a social regard or disregard. A corporate billboard is something altogether different from a graphic novel or a highway overpass tagged with graffiti. Todoran is not meant to compete with Helvetica. Nor is it meant to go head-tohead with, say, Times New Roman or other classic typographies used in books and printed media. Instead, it’s pitched at future audiences.
From left: Y (upper and lowercase), &, B, Land G.
”’The beauty of Todoran is that aesthetically it has fine art and lowbrow influences while being technically sound,” says Todoran. “This allows the typeface flexibility in usage that I will leave up to future designers.”
Half Serbian and half Romanian, Todoran, 34, grew up in West Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s and started to tag while injunior high school. “All my friends were graffiti artists and a lot of my peers were in gangs, crews and clubs. I dabbled a little bit in junior high. But I wasn’t a serious graffiti artist until after high school.” says Todoran, who sports eight knuckle tattoos spelling “HARD WORK.”
“I was in limbo back then, so I put all of my energies into graffiti. I developed a style and started learning characters. I was writing all the time. I had a backpack filled with spray paint cans and Lunchables and I worked all day for the rush and the fame.”
With tagging, however, came a crazy life. Todoran was surrounded by violence. He wouldn’t leave his house unless a friend was packing a gnn. Eventually, he came to the realization that he needed to move on.
In 1999, he joined the Coast Guard and did a four-year stint-two years of heavy weather search and rescue off Oregon and two years on a buoy tender in Hawaii. The Coast Guard made him grow up in a hurry. “I was this punk kid from L.A. with a big chip on my shoulder-unwarranted, but it was there,” he says.
Following his passion for design, Todoran went to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and majored in fine arts. That’s where he developed Todoran. It was an attempt to create a completely original typeface that reflected the times.
These days, he’s a grad student at Ohio State, where he studies landscape architecture. It’s a field that first came into focus in Las Vegas when Todoran realized his ability to design social solutions for complex problems. It fits well with his passion for typography, for both are concerned with creating beauty amid challenges and constraints.
But the typeface is still a consuming passion and Todoran has a vision for it.He wants to digitize the characters already developed and then market and adapt them into the Cyrillic alphabet and, after that, into Arabic. So far, Todoran has drawn 81 characters, but he needs twice that number to accommodate italic letters, numbers and symbols.
“If I choose to put the characters at a 15-degree angle, what parts do I need to remove or accentuate? That’s when it becomes interesting,” he says with a slight smile. “It poses a whole new design problem”
